Right now I'm sitting at the kitchen table in this purgatory known as "apartment living" while my new house sits uncompleted only a kilometer away.  This completely sucks so I went and picked out a nice new mahogany veneer desk/workstation setup to go in my office when this new house is ready for occupancy.  I am also standing by to order an Aeron chair as it is the most comfortable chair I've ever sat in.  I just built a fast new PC.

I do a lot of work from home. This new office will eliminate manyof the frutrations I have at client sites: the ergonomic nightmare, the slow PCs with no memory and slow hard drives, the silly IT policies blocking this or that messenger, the mandatory virus scans that happen every Thursday at 1pm and render your already slow laptop completely incapable of doing any real work for two hours.  Yeah, the 10,000 RPM Serial ATA hard drive with a gig of ram and 3.6ghz proc can compile the hell out of that code, and setting up multiple monitors is genuinely useful for work.  Its too bad I'll only have this excellent environment for the 10-20 hours per week I am working on side projects at home, while the majority of the work I do will be in the cubical with its interruptions and inferior equipment. 

No matter how many studies are done linking good environment, no internet monitoring, and good equipment to higher worker productivity we are just not ready for the progressive office here in the midwest.  I have yet to see a single office that can hold a candle to the type of work environment a developer would choose if asked to create an environment where they could be most productive.  I think my goal for 2006 is to seek out ways to work from home as much as possible.  Does anyone out there have "Work from home" stories?

Update: supporting documentat http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,1083900,00.html