Working from home

Source A: an original contemporary non-fiction-style account.

“I began working from home three days a week in September. My desk occupies one end of the kitchen table, and at five I put the laptop into a cupboard so that dinner does not become another meeting. The saved commute gives me forty minutes each way. I use some of it to walk before work, rather than allowing the working day to expand into the empty space. On office days, I am glad to see colleagues without arranging a call first.

Home working has made my day quieter, but not automatically smaller. Messages can colonise the evening if I let them, and the laptop's closed lid is not a lock. At the office, leaving the building once drew a clear line; now I have to draw it myself. I value the flexibility, especially when an appointment would otherwise require half a day away. Yet I dislike the suggestion that everyone has a spare room and reliable silence. A kitchen table shared with children, housemates or caring duties is not the same workplace as a private study. Choice matters more than slogans about where the future belongs.”

Source B: an original nineteenth-century-style letter or account, written for practice; this is not an archival document.

“I write these lines from the room in which I also take my meals, mend my clothes and receive such visitors as can endure the confusion. My employment as a copyist allows me to remain at home, a convenience often praised by acquaintances who imagine a desk beside a sunny window. The window is north-facing, and the desk is the only table. Before tea, I must rescue each sheet from the neighbourhood of the kettle.

There is liberty in arranging one's hours, but liberty requires a boundary or it becomes merely another name for labour without end. A customer may send work at dusk and speak of the morning as though the intervening night were an unused shelf. I have learned to state when I shall deliver it, though I do not always possess the courage to refuse. Those who recommend domestic employment to everyone should first enquire how many rooms, how much quiet and how many other claims upon attention a household contains. A man may own his time in theory while finding that everyone else has borrowed it.”

Refer to both sources. Infer the differences in the physical arrangements for work in the two homes. Write a summary supported by details from both sources.