Writing for life

"Working it" column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 05/11/2007

Proponents of the fight to save our planet from the impending doom of global warming tell us that using our cars less is one of the main things we can do to help reduce our carbon emissions and do our bit towards saving the existence of mankind. I’ve embraced this concept wholeheartedly.

I work in an office in the back garden, and every morning face an arduous 20 second commute out the back door, up five steps and across the lawn. The only carbon I’m emitting en-route is the regular human respiratory variety… and I assume that’s all right.

Okay, I’ll admit it… my decision to work from home wasn’t driven by an altruistic desire to preserve the planet. It was a purely selfish decision based on criteria like spending more time with my young family and being master of my own destiny rather than at somebody else’s beck and call. But avoiding the commute was another very big plus.

Last week I got a taste of what I was missing when I had to travel up to the city for a training seminar. Coffee and registration was scheduled to begin at 08:30, with the seminar kicking off at 9am sharp. No problem, I thought. Allowing time for traffic, I left home at 06:30 on a trip that, under normal circumstances, would take me exactly an hour. Two hours later I was sitting in a queue near city hall, wondering if I was going to make the start of the seminar at all.

The drive up from West Cork had started badly. At that time of the morning all of the lunatics come out of the woodwork and get behind the wheel. Most of them, it seems, drive transit vans. Now, you’d think a fully laden transit van would be a fairly sedate beast on the road – but you’d be wrong. They’d come flying up behind you, lights blazing, dive onto the wrong side of the road to pass three or four cars on a blind bend, cut in dangerously when confronted by oncoming traffic, tailgate alarmingly and generally cause all sorts of vehicular mayhem. It was sheer madness.

I saw more dangerous driving in those hair-raising two hours than I did in the whole of a four month road trip through France and Spain over the summer. It was a chronic indictment of the ability of Irish road users, and left me wondering how the carnage on our roads isn’t much, much worse.

By the time I reached the outskirts of the city I was a gibbering wreck. And then I hit the traffic jams, and things went from bad to worse. It beats me how people can put up with this madness day-in-day-out. Being stuck in traffic saps the life out of you. It’s mind-numbing and incredibly frustrating, but at the same time you have to keep your wits about you and concentrate through the tedium. The aforementioned lunatics are still at large – and like rats they’re even more dangerous in confined spaces.

I eventually made it to the seminar registration with minutes to spare: just enough time to grab a strong coffee to settle my addled nerves before things got under way. The drive up had left me mentally wrung out, and the day was only just beginning. I thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t have to do it every day, and pondered just how priceless my 20 second commute really is!