“It was freaky,” says Marijean Jaggers, describing the point in her life when she began working at home. It was early 2006 and her husband had been transferred from St. Louis to Charlottesville; she’d decided she would keep her job with a public relations firm and telecommute from her new home in Hollymead. Friends kept asking if Jaggers, a self-described “people person,” would be O.K. working alone. “The more people said that, the more I wondered if I would be O.K.,” she says. “But I have been. I don’t mind being by myself as much as I thought I would. I like the focus.”
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Jaggers was on the C-VILLE 20 list in 2007 because of her community work and well-read blogs; clearly, she’s an organized sort of person. She, her husband and their two children left St. Louis the day after Christmas of 2005; their stuff arrived in Charlottesville just after New Year’s, and Jaggers was scheduled to start working on January 7. “The kids started school that day,” she remembers. “It was important to me to set up the office exactly how I wanted it before I started working in it. It had to be a regular working day.” She undertook a blitzkrieg unpacking effort and slid back into working life, right on time.
In St. Louis, her commute was 45 minutes in the morning and 1 1/2 hours in the afternoon. Here, it’s just a walk down the stairs to the basement. For a while, a next-door neighbor was also working at home, and their office windows faced each other, almost like cubicles.
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“It doesn’t feel like the basement because you have these [glass doors to a patio]. There’s a nice view of the pond, squirrels running around. One day I looked out and five giant deer walked across the lawn. There’s a goose that nests every year [in the pond]. A blue heron fishes there.
“[The workday starts at] 8 every morning. I get completely dressed—shoes, lipstick. It’s a state of mind. If I worked in sweats or PJs I would feel like I was sick. This [jeans and a sweater] is a typical uniform. I work straight through until 2:30; I forget to eat lunch. I get my daughter [from nearby Hollymead Elementary School], chat with her, she gets a snack. Then she does homework and I come back down here. It’s a good 15-minute break and I get a walk, get some fresh air. Five or 6 is when I bail out and start dinner. In the winter it’s nice—I throw something in the Crockpot and I smell it all day.
“I remember telling my kids, when I’m in here you have to pretend I’m not home. My daughter writes me Post-its when I’m on a call. [The rule is,] if you’re not bleeding it’s not an emergency.
“This is me with my two sisters, being Charlie’s Angels. This is my name tag from the BlogHer conference [in 2007 in Chicago]—800 female bloggers. This is the theoretical exercise machine. Sometimes I get on it when I’m on a conference call that I’m just listening on.
“A few weeks after I started working from home…my clients were aware of this transition, but they didn’t think of me being in a home office until my dog barked. The client said, ‘Did you just bark at me?’”
