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Four Greatest Ideas for Working from the Office of Your Dreams • 39

office. This is very useful and your way of working should not cancel this myth out
unless you want it to. A consultant worked from a flat in London that he shared
from time to time with his daughter. The managing director of one of his clients
grew slightly suspicious of him when he phoned one day and was answered by the
consultant's daughter accompanied by a loud crash. 'Sorry,' said the daughter, 'I
dropped the iron.'

You cannot train children or teenagers to answer a telephone with anything
except a loud 'Hallo?' so don't try. It is highly desirable to have three telephone
lines. One is the number on your headed notepaper and cards. Keep this for incom-
ing calls only so that people do not get the engaged tone too often. Use another line
for outgoing calls and make that the one your children use.

It is a personal thing whether you use the call-waiting system where a caller
trying to ring when the line is busy is told by a mechanical voice that they are trying
to connect you. If you are not then connected, you know that the person you are
trying to reach regards his or her current call as more important than yours. Besides
which I can never remember how to use it, so the panic that ensues upsets the call
you are already on as well as looking discourteous to the person trying to get through.
We think it is better to get an answering machine and ban the kids from answering
the office phone.

The third line is for the fax and Internet.
A final thought on working from home. Make sure that your family knows that
you are going to work just as hard at home as you did when you went out to an
office. They grew to accept the fact that you came home late quite often, but this a
new situation. They may be surprised that you cannot join them when they are
ready for tea, and so on. Pre-empt this because the nth time you hear the mumble,
'I don't know what you do up there all day', when you are sweating bricks to make
a living can be quite irritating.