While I was having dinner with my parents during Silver Week,

"You know that 'telework' everyone's been talking about lately? Well, I've been doing that 'telework' since 1982," said my mother.

My boss agreed to the conditions I set to balance work and parenting, so I spent my days working from home as a programmer and only going into the office in person for necessary meetings and when I needed to fix bugs. It’s true—when I was a kid, my mom was always at home.

When I asked him about his job, he lowered his voice—even though we were alone—and said, “I’m not really supposed to say this,” but apparently he mainly developed simulators under contracts from government agencies. “Of course, that was just part of it!” he added.

He also happily recounted how he’d created a program to automate the payment process for the more than 1,000 part-time workers doing piecework at his father’s factory—since settling their accounts seemed like such a hassle—and how this drastically improved efficiency, earning him deep gratitude from both the office staff and the bank. Was that in 1985?

After hearing about that, other companies also reached out with requests, and he reportedly customized the service to meet their needs. This was simply work he took on as an individual.

When I asked, “Was it something like what we call accounting software?” he replied, “It might not have been anything that fancy, but there weren’t any commercially available options at the time.” Though it’s unclear if there really weren’t any.

"I was so nervous during the Y2K crisis—though nothing actually happened!" my mom continued (*^^*)

My mother—who was always cheerful and gentle, loved cooking and crafts, and was always at home, so much so that when I was a child I thought she was a stay-at-home mom—I never knew until now that she had entered the year 2000 while harboring such anxieties.

Wasn't it actually pretty pioneering to work as a programmer while raising kids remotely? You certainly don't seem like that at all, though!

For starters, I ate a huge amount of horse sashimi.