by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

For years I toiled in Montreal’s savage office wildlife, showing up daily to a padded downtown cubicle zoo to work alongside a variety of scary beasts.

It was one job, but it felt like many. Getting to work was serious labour. Dealing with the various fellow slaves was another job. These included such tricky characters as a humourless Eurotrash clock nazi with a fetish for marking you late and an otherwise amiable separatist whose forehead vein would angrily bulge when explaining why he’d never set foot in Ontario.

There were countless chicks offering free accounts of their disastrously mismanaged personal lives, plus suck-ups, resentment hounds and endlessly distracting flirting, laughing at unfunny quips, ego duelling, fights over seats, as well as the radio selection war.

Every day I’d ask myself: could I get away with calling in sick? Scads of colleagues would answer that by disappearing for months on end on mysterious sick leave.

In my current occupation, I roll out of bed, wander downstairs, chug an espresso then enter a green room off my balcony and start to pester people on the phone.

Few are so lucky. Five days a week, twice a day, Montrealers conduct an inexplicable, disruptive, time-consuming and totally unnecessary mass urban migration. They jam the roads, stop and start on bridges, pour hydrocarbons into the air and jostle for bus seats, all in a mad dash to and from offices.

The average Canadian worker is said to spend the equivalent of six full work weeks a year commuting. They dole out travel money, spend cash on presentable office threads and shell out for the privilege of chowing down on somewhat gross fast food lunches.

It’s quite cruel, when you think about it.

Forcing people to show up also costs employers. Renting office space ain’t cheap, and salaries rise due to workers’ need to cover their own commuting costs.

Yet employers aren’t too keen on their employees toiling in a place where they can’t peer over their shoulder. It’s an antiquated approach, when you consider that the same results could be achieved through messaging, cell phones, e-mail or video cameras.

Seems the only time employers don’t mind that you’re not in the office is if you’re in Romania or India, where they’re increasingly sending such jobs as tech support and code-scripting.

Experts wrongly predicted that a solid percentage of us would be working from home by now. Yet the 2001 census shows little increase over the last 20 years.

A few corporations have gone for it, like Bell Canada, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Our feds were keen for a while, but they’ve backed off.

I recently had my prejudices confirmed (always a good feeling) by Bob Fortier, an Ottawan who consults and lobbies for telework. He tossed a bagful of calculations at me suggesting, among other things, that even if a small percentage of commuters stayed home, pollution would decrease massively. I suppose gas prices would decline too, due to decreased demand. Fortier predicts more will work from home as old-guard management resistance shuffles off into retirement.

He reckons workers will start jumping to other companies that allow them to do their stuff at home, accelerating the process. And he predicts that if a great pandemic strikes, workers will simply refuse to go to work to expose themselves to communicable disease.

Fortier says much telework starts insidiously. On Monday you tell your boss that you’ve got to wait for the cable guy. Next week it’s the Maytag repairman. Suddenly you’ve got a tradition of working at home every Monday.

For those who hate working from home, cities like Toronto and Washington are seeing telework centres mushroom up in their suburbs. Come by, fire up a computer and do your job.

Sadly though, teleworking could ravage our beloved downtown. Pencil pushers will move to Vaudreuil and Dorion never to return. Place Ville Marie could become as useless as the Big O. The food court at Complexe Desjardins will be tragically bare. Eatons will close. Or has it already? I haven’t been down there for a while.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca