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PAST PREDICTIONS FOR our technical future that have gone wide of the mark are  provoking smiles.

In 1940, Henry Ford insisted we were on the verge of the flying car. We should have been deep into interstellar travel by now and robots should be cleaning our houses.

More recent  predictions, dating from the early 1990s,  saw no further need for office towers and crowded underground railway trains and envisaged Central district being transformed into a quiet leafy neighbourhood to be enjoyed on week days as well as weekends.

The basis for the prediction was that the explosion of internet technology and the widespread use of personal computers in private homes would mean that nearly everybody who used to work in an office would be working from home instead.

The PC has gone from strength to strength, but the concept of 'teleworking', or setting up 'remote offices', never even drew breath in Hong Kong.

Nor will it, from what I discovered.

As far as I can tell, there are only two sets of circumstances in which teleworking seriously recommends itself. The first is for those working exclusively with people in the region or around the globe.

Mary, an executive with an international retailer of health and skin-care goods, did just that until her recent promotion.

'It saved me two hours a day from the commute and I liked it,' she said. 'Now I head up a team here, so working from home is useless.'

The other situation is where a woman is bringing up young children and wants to work.

But I did not meet anyone in this position, and the rest of the office-bound workers I spoke to turned up their noses at teleworking.

Why are they so happy to go to an office?

Stephen, an operator in the catering industry, had the answer.

'Four hundred square feet at home and a screaming family - that might be an incentive,' he pointed out.

'They have so little space to live in, they even bring their breakfast to work. Can you imagine keeping office workers in a flat like that with a PC on a folding table all day?'

There is also the problem of neighbourhood construction work and renovations. Contractors are permitted to work on residential flats at teeth-juddering noise levels during the hours  you are supposed to be at work. There is always somebody knocking down walls around you, and the work can go on  for months.

Commercial office buildings, on the other hand, are  rigorously sound-proofed and managed, and   designed to shield their tenants from undue disturbances of that nature.

Mary had a darker take on the consequences of staying at home. 'People are used to going out, so if you stay at home for a long time, people will gossip. It's the Chinese culture,' she said.

In Hong Kong, there is every reason in the world to want to go to work, rather than stay at home with your files and documents. Everybody agrees that this city is so compact and the transport system so efficient that commuting to work is not a problem; people do not even stop to think about it.

Then consider the risks of working from home.

If anything goes wrong with your computer at home, it could take hours to get  a technician to come over and sort things out. In a proper office, such technical glitches would take mere minutes to correct.

A sense of community seems to be at the heart of the desire to keep showing up at the office on a daily basis. People believe that work goes smoothly when conducted  face to face,  rather than remotely in cyberspace.

People like the concept of the office and being part of the office crowd, and its social world gathered around the water cooler.

Office life means a mingling and mixing of sexes, age groups and backgrounds,  eight hours a day,  something most urban men and women are reluctant to do without.

In the case of  some lonely  souls, office society is the only  society they have.  The last thing they want is to be stuck alone at home  with a PC.

A senior partner in an engineering firm who has the freedom to  order his day exactly as he wants, said he enjoyed  going into the office every morning. 'I must have a reason to get out of bed,' he insisted.

Against such scenarios,  no self-respecting business would think seriously about giving up its prime office space, dishing out PCs to its employees and telling them to go home. They would not wear it. Who would pay for the 10 hours of extra air-conditioning every day?

After 10 years working as a civil servant, I walked away from offices and never went back. As a self-employed writer, I have worked from home for 22 years and I used to rejoice in it.

But now I am in trouble. My  building is due for renovation, which will take six months. I have been warned that the racket will be intolerable, and I have been advised to take up space in someone else's office or at a business centre.

I have been playing with the idea of working in a sitting-out area under a city flyover or occupying a stone hut in the New Territories.

I am even considering a house on stilts in the north of Thailand. After all, if I am supposed to be operating a 'remote office', now would be the chance to do it seriously.

'People like the concept of the office and being part of the office crowd, and its social world'



Working from home not even a remote possibility for Hong Kong's office society