Life & Wisdom Quote by Judith Martin

Working at home doesn’t just collapse the commute; it collapses the social moat. Judith Martin, better known as Miss Manners, delivers that point with the sly precision of someone who understands that etiquette is less about forks than about boundaries. The joke lands because it’s true in a way people rarely admit: offices aren’t only productivity machines, they’re also systems of controlled access. The receptionist is a small bureaucratic miracle - a human firewall translating interruptions into appointments, filtering urgency from entitlement, turning “I just had a quick question” into “not right now.”

Martin’s intent is gently corrective. She’s not romanticizing corporate life; she’s puncturing the fantasy that working from home is simply the same job with softer pants. The subtext is that privacy is infrastructural. At home, you’re stripped of the polite fictions that protect time: the closed door that means “in a meeting,” the calendar that others respect, the colleague who can intercept a wanderer. Without that gatekeeping, every knock, call, delivery, and family “quick thing” becomes a negotiation - and the home worker is forced into the awkward role of being their own receptionist, bouncer, and customer service rep.

Context matters: Martin has long argued that manners are social technology, not moral decoration. Read through that lens, the line becomes a critique of how we offload emotional labor onto unseen workers, then notice its value only when it’s gone. Remote work didn’t invent interruptions; it just made the boundary problem visible, personal, and strangely intimate.