Shortly after we moved into the Stoner Drive house, I asked my mother why Aba (a version of “Dad” in Urdu) did not have a job.

“You think your father does not work?” my mother asked, lounging on a sofa in the Breakfast Room while motioning for me to pass her the packet of Kent cigarettes which were slightly out of her reach.

“All my friends’ fathers go to work every morning. To an office. And Aba doesn’t. I think he should get a job,” I said with disdain as I handed her the cigarettes. Too young to understand that the lifestyle to which I was becoming accustomed was thanks to my father’s work.

My father was blacklisted from Pakistan and was unable to travel back for a few years after we moved to Connecticut. His business was still in Pakistan and he was running it from our home in Connecticut. Nowadays we call this “working remotely,” but back then we didn’t have the kinds of technologies that make working at home seamless like email, instant messaging, mobile phones, Skype, or even answering machines for that matter.

We did have fancy phones in the Stoner house, though. They were office  phones, clunky by today’s standards but state of the art for 1974. They had lots of buttons that would light up and flash when the phone would ring or if you put someone on hold.

The phones also functioned as a sort of intercom system. Let’s say you were in the kitchen and picked up the phone when it rang, and the person on the other end asked for my sister Muna. There was a good chance Muna would be lazing around somewhere with her nose in a book. Your first guess might be that she was in the Sun Room, so you’d press the button marked Sun Room and say, “Muna, you have a call on line 1” without ever having to leave the kitchen. Since you wouldn’t have to go running all around the house trying to locate people, this saved quite a bit of time.

I always thought the fancy phones looked out of place since they were very clearly office phones, but the advanced intercom technology was worth it. As was the hold button which I noticed other people did not have in their homes. I know my father liked these phones as well since he seemed to use them a lot. Often at odd hours of the day and night. I later came to understand that this was because of the time difference between Pakistan and Connecticut.

At the time, it did not occur to me that talking on the phone was work. But now, I get it. I am in phone meetings or conference calls most of the day, often when I am working from home.

Is that a call coming in? Please hold.