Working From (a Model) Home

You can’t search Indeed for a job like mine.

I lamented this difficulty to my husband as I searched for a part-time job to supplement my writing income. “I don’t care what I do in the job. What are the right search terms for finding a job where I have great coworkers, or I learn things, or I never get hassled about taking days off?” I loved writing at home with my dog. I didn’t need a new career; I needed to wear clothes and leave the house sometimes, and to get paid a steady wage.

It never even occurred to me to ask how to find a job where I don’t do anything.

To be clear, I hate boring jobs. I’d rather work hard, watch the time fly, and go home exhausted than try to fill time. I’ve probably held twenty jobs in my life, and the only one I’ve truly hated—started sweating as soon as I got off work in my dread of returning—was an amalgam of downtime and mind-numbingly boring tasks.

But my current job goes beyond boring into a magical new realm: it requires so little responsibility that I can continue building my full-time writing career without a hitch. I just had to move my laptop operation from my home to a model home.

I was planning to gig for a temp agency while my job search went on. Then my agency told me that they needed candidates for a permanent part-time role. “The builder needs someone to… to sit in the model homes on the agents’ days off,” my recruiter said.

I wasn’t sure, but this sounded like the kind of role where you might talk to someone every hour or two; maybe the rest of the time I could squeeze some writing in. It would be like the opposite of a coworking space: I’d get paid to use someone else’s secure internet in nice surroundings. I figured I’d go to the interview and bail on the job if it started to sound like the “talking to strangers” part would get too intensive.

“Our model homes are our storefronts—open seven days a week.” My interviewer offered no other explanation for why the builder would pay someone a fairly decent wage to sit around in them. I suppose even in an exploding housing market, every potential lead on a half-million dollar home sale must be captured. I kept waiting for the slipped-in “light filing” or “a few outbound phone calls,” indicating they’d want me to use my time for something other than hoping for knocks on the door in the middle of the weekday, but the interviewer and I mostly talked about our dogs.

“Here is the job,” he said. “Greet people, give them a brochure, and take down their information for the sales agent to follow up.” I wasn’t allowed to talk about money or trained to talk about houses, so it was clear that I would be simply a greeter and informational-folder-delivery device. I smiled and nodded in my sheath dress and heels, since this seemed to be the major required skill.

My recruiter called to ask if I could start the next week.

On my first day, I didn’t bring my laptop, afraid I’d look too eager to accomplish something besides staring at the door. This was a mistake: all three of my bosses told me I’d want to bring something to do. I made it from their office to the model home by ten o’clock; after handing me a key and gesturing to some stacks of paper, the agent disappeared and I was alone. I have been alone since then.

There was no phone. There were no papers to file. There was me and my sheath dress and a kitchen with sweeping hunks of granite but no refrigerator. I had eight hours to fill. I read the cookbook in the kitchen; I drained the battery and the data from my phone.

I’m writing now from my second day in the model home. It smells like construction finishes and sounds like unfinished construction. I still feel I am intruding on this house, like it has a half-furnished life of its own; the immaculate walls and plastic fruit seem like they could belong to some immaculate plastic people who will return at any minute. Of course, this will someday be someone’s home, so maybe I am haunted by future-ghosts: the family who will someday live here with little inkling that I once worked here, once spilled my weird Paleo spaghetti squash casserole all over the gleaming cupboards and cleaned it up with toilet paper.

When I’m not trying to conceal evidence of my clumsiness, I’m writing articles, building my new website, and networking on Twitter. The difference between here and home is there are no cleaning or cooking tasks to distract me, and—correlated—the sheath dress.

So far I have not seen a single visitor. The neighborhood is small and set far back in a wealthy residential area; it is Wednesday. No one is coming by to see this house. I’ve interacted with a real estate agent, the construction foreman, and a home inspector, and they’ve all asked me how I’m holding up through my boredom.

I don’t know if other people who take this job read all day, drain their phone batteries, or compulsively straighten all the furniture. Don’t tell anyone, but I’m not bored; I’m plenty busy building my writing career and pretending this $500,000 house is mine.

If only I could find a way to bring my dog.

Lyndsey Medford lives in South Carolina, where she bakes elaborate goods and snuggles with her husband and rescue pup. She writes about faith, justice, and bodies at lyndseymedford.com.

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