Literary Los Angeles: Working from Home

I recently read a statistic (from a source I have since misplaced and so can’t cite here) stating that Los Angeles has the highest percentage of freelance, temporary, and contract workers of any city in the country.   While this is a vague and uncited statistic, it fits with my impression of L.A., that work of many kinds here is improvisational, provisional, hard to define and hard to depend on.   Certainly of all the many places I’ve lived, Los Angeles is the one where a restaurant is just as likely to be full on a Tuesday morning as on a Saturday afternoon.

“Don’t you people have jobs?” I often fume to myself as I look for parking at the shopping mall on a weekday afternoon, all the while conceding that I too am a freelancer, and I too run errands at two o’ clock on a Wednesday.

The advantages of freelancing (or rather, of working from home, something not all freelancers do) are many and obvious: no commute, no dress code, no cubicle.   But one of the disadvantages is a lack of community.   Though this always comes out utterly trite at job interviews, it’s true: my favorite thing about all my past jobs has been my coworkers.   I liked talking with them, joking and commiserating with them, gossiping about them after they quit or were fired.   I liked after-work drinks, company Christmas parties, and sad little office birthday cakes.   Coworkers are a sort of second family, if often a dysfunctional one.   Freelancing is lonely.   Most of my “coworkers” are virtual ones, often hundreds or thousands of miles away, in many cases people I have never met face-to-face.

It is for that reason (among others) that I do almost all my work from coffee shops.   Or specifically, from a pool of two or three coffee shops where I am a regular, where I see the same freelancers and their laptops every day, where I check in much as I used to do at the office, to ask how someone else’s script is going, or how their website is shaping up, or whether they’ve heard back from their agent.   Without a real office, these non-traditional workers and I have nonetheless built a community.

The coffee shop that I go to the most often is a Starbucks.   I support local businesses as much as I can, and there are several local coffee shops I love: Intelligentsia in Silver Lake for its outstanding coffee; Swork in Eagle Rock for its friendly vibe and demarcated free-for-all children’s play corral.   But Swork and Intelligentsia are a drive away, and Starbucks is only a very short walk, so Starbucks wins out more often than not.

My local coffee shop and its staff are major parts of my life.   It was the first place I took my new baby outside of the house.   I make everyone who works there fudge for Christmas.   They know my order and have it all written out on the cup before I have to say a word, and they know my husband’s too (though not his name, leaving them to mark our cups rather charmingly as “Summer” and “Summer’s Husband”).   They ask after my daughter Beatrice when she isn’t with me, remember my parents from their frequent visits, and notice when I’ve been out of town.   I’m friends with most of the staff — even Facebook friends with one barista whose son is a little older than my daughter and who dispenses been-there, done-that advice on teething along with my iced lattes.

In the way that vines overrun a concrete wall, the neighborhood has reclaimed the Starbucks, turning what was once a generic chain store into an authentic community hub.   I’ve overheard job interviews, conference calls, and more than once, what sounded like a sales pitch for a pyramid scheme.   There are also families, students, and a group of about a dozen elderly Armenian men who sit on the patio all day playing backgammon.

(One time I arrived at Starbucks on my way out of town shortly after their 5:00am opening time.   “I must be your first customer,” I said to the barista.   “No, they were here waiting for me to open the doors when I get in in the morning,” she said, indicating the backgammon players.)

Like coworkers, my fellow customers are a heterogeneous group that was randomly assigned to me through proximity and it is through proximity that I have come to enjoy seeing them every day.

Now that I am considering moving to a different neighborhood in Los Angeles, I have started feeling sentimental about my local coffee shop.   Of course I’m only planning on moving a few miles away, but Starbucks is sufficiently ubiquitous that there will be maybe a dozen closer venues than the one I currently think of as my office.   Happily, as L.A. is a city of freelance workers building communities on the fly, I’m sure I’ll find another thriving professional coffee shop scene wherever I go.