As the debate on working from home roars on, it is time for me to weigh in. Apparently 70% of employees want work from home, 70% of CEOs do not. I am on the side of the employees.

I worked from home for most of my 20 years at CMP, including several years during which I was the only WFH employee.  I know some of my fellow employees (including a couple of readers of this column) resented the “deal” I had, but it worked out well for the company. It is a matter of verifiable fact (if there were still any copies left anywhere in the world you could check) that I wrote one-third of the copy in InformationWeek during the tumultuous August of 1985. I was almost always the most productive member of every staff I served on.

It came about in an amusing way. I moved to Orinda, CA in April 1979 for a job in Cupertino, CA. I chose a town an hour away because that’s where my future wife owned a home. For my first six months, I worked three days a week in Cupertino, spending two nights at a Motel 6.

The situation was untenable. So, on a visit to headquarters in Manhasset, NY (in pre-PowerPoint days) I prepared a flip chart presentation for Computer Systems News’ lanky, sweet and daffy publisher, Tom Cooper, explaining why it was OK for me to work at home.

When I entered his office with an easel, his reaction was immediate. “What do you want?”

“To work from home,” I replied.

“If you don’t show me the flip charts, I’ll let you do it.”

In 20 years at various CMP publications, I spent many hours on I-680 driving to Silicon Valley for interviews and news conferences, and many more hours on planes to visit vendors all over the West. What I didn’t do was spend hours each day commuting to an office so I could eat bad food/snacks and drink too much coffee. I never missed a deadline―and I never missed a soccer game or school play.

Every older journalist I ever knew had a bad back from decades of sitting in the crappy chairs supplied by their employers. Working at home, I bought my own ergonomic chairs. A reader who knows about this wrote:

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