When traffic and weather chaos hits, the expectation work must be from the office is outdated

OPINION: It was a great day to work from home. A spell of torrential rain that took all of Auckland by surprise (don't they always?) was already hammering the roof when I opened my eyes, and a steep drop in temperature was forecast. There were no pressing meetings to attend. The decision made itself before I even had to break from the warmth of the duvet. I may have lingered a bit longer than usual, but I figured that was time saved by losing the morning commute. Then I got up, put a hoodie on, and went downstairs to work. I already know this is absolutely fine by the boss, who when he hired me literally said, "work from home or from the office or both, whatever you like". I remember being pleased by the implicit trust and the possibility that some days when – like this day – there were calls and emails and words to write but no physical need for me to put on office clothes and an office face, I could justifiably stay in my pyjamas. READ MORE: Wellington rail meltdown would have been averted The 55-year-old wagon that sent Wellington rail into turmoil Heroes of the commuter chaos are just what Wellington needs Focus on flexible work thanks to traffic chaos I've never been able to do this before. Working in television and radio requires your actual presence in a studio. 'Hell yeah', I thought at the time. But more than a year on, I am only an infrequent home-worker. The car-tasrophe on Wednesday, where an overnight derailment at the yards hurled Wellingtonians into a train-less nightmare, really got me thinking. With no replacement buses available rail bosses told people to stay at home if they could. Two-hour traffic jams suggested they just didn't, or couldn't. Why, decades after we were promised technology would make this a no-brainer, is regularly working from home still not really a thing? In these days of hot-desking, where logging in from home is a 15-second, password-protected micro-task, why didn't more of the 20,000 train travellers not just stay home? By all accounts it was chaos morning and afternoon on Wednesday. Wasn't that a massive waste of angsty human emotion? How productive were you really once you'd spent two hours fretting on the clogged roads? While half of all Kiwi workers are able to vary their start and finish times, only a third of us have worked from home, according to 2018 figures from Statistics New Zealand. Obviously, not everyone was able to follow Metlink's advice. There are plenty of jobs that must have a warm body on-site (only four in 10 workers in healthcare have flexible hours, for example) and in these situations it's good to know your rights. It mostly comes down to a conversation with your manager. By law, it's your responsibility to find your way to work even when it resembles Frodo's trek to Mordor – but you'd hope most managers would be reasonably-minded on a day like Wednesday. That is, until you discover the biggest barrier to the WFH utopia appears to be... managers. A