Career change - working from home doesn't feel right

In My Humble Opinion
1

After ten years as a shift operator and supervisor in various industrial plants I built up enough of a skill-set in a certain utility to get myself a service/sales rep job for that particular utility. My day starts in my home office and I have a company vehicle.

I may travel as needed up to three days a week. When I do it can be an 800 mile round trip. I have small kids at home (work knows this) so I forgo getting a hotel room so I can get home tuck my daughter in. Days like those I feel accomplished. Fourteen hours in a vehicle (with an hour or two visiting a customer) is nothing compared to 12 in some shithole plant turning valves and doing lab tests all day.

What doesn’t feel right are the days I “work from home”. I’m brand new, two months in. On my days where I work from home, I’ll sit out in my home office and day-dream. I have a list of leads to call (I’m not a salesman per se, I am more of technical support for route salesman) and try to schedule appointments with. I find more often then not that they don’t pick up the phone. If anyone calls me I answer immediately and I deal with emails right away as well. I have a small amount of lab data to pour over along with trip and expense reports on occasion. That’s it. This week I only did two long day trips and tried to make a third but got turned around due to a blizzard. Two days of essentially what I feel is nothing in the home office along with most of another day from getting turned around.

I’m on salary and took a pay cut from my exorbitant hourly wage along with a ridiculous amount of overtime I got before to work basically any day of the year instead of a standard M-F no holidays gig that I have now.

What do you guys think? Am I sloughing or is this typical in a role like this? My job duties are to service, sell, install certain utility systems across a given territory. Identify and troubleshoot issues with a customer’s current system and prescribe a treatment plan.

This coming week, I don’t have much. I’m “working from home” Monday (I’m actually going to be doing my taxes), doing an install 400 miles away Tuesday which may put me in a hotel room that night and may have some service work 130 miles away the rest of the week, but I only envision that being a day’s worth of work. A customer meeting may pop out of the wood work for Thursday and or Friday but then again it may not.

When I first set my sites on this kind of job I thought it would be cool to work from home as I could pursue working around the house and other not actually working bullshit things. Now that I finally got this job - it doesn’t feel right! Am I just paranoid? Maybe things will get to the point where I’m so damn busy I won’t have time to hang out in the home office. I dunno.

2

It sounds to me like they are paying you to be available. That’s not a little thing: you may feel at loose ends, but you really aren’t, because your end of the bargain is that if they call, you gotta go. So that puts a limit on what you can use your time for. It can absolutely make business sense for them to do this. It doesn’t mean you are slacking or not doing your share. You are available. Look at it from their point of view: could they have found a skilled professional willing to work part time, and only be paid on those days they actually needed them to drive across the region? Probably not.

On your “on call” days, you are being paid for being ready, willing and able to work when and however much they need you.

3

I know what you are talking about. I’ve worked for consulting firms and professional services organizations for like 20 years. If you aren’t staffed on a project, we call it being “on the bench”. Just means you have no billable work so you do whatever to keep busy. It’s fine for a couple of days or even a few weeks if you know you have a new client lined up. It starts getting stressful if you start to go week after week without a billable client. Doing this from home can be a bit more stressful under these circumstances because you can start to feel like it’s a short trip from “working from home” to “just being home”.

4

I appreciate the words. I’m sure before too long I’ll have more work than I know what to do with or someone will push me in another direction. For the time being I’ll live with it

5

You’re still really new in this role, it takes time to bed in and build up your workload. Give it time - and find some DIY to do around the house so you don’t feel you’re wasting hours at a desk for no reason.

6

Figures. This week ended up being pretty good. Although I didn’t do much Monday, Tuesday was a 15 hour day that put me in a hotel, and I made a call on the way home Wednesday along with some other work-related errands I made it home around 5 PM. Then Thursday was service work 2.5 hours away that ended up being a 12 hour day. Very satisfying. Yesterday I worked from home as I’m on a plane tomorrow to work on a project out of state all week. I think it’ll even out in the end - I just have to convince the man in the mirror.