Tom Neumayr sat out in the rain last Friday on his big sleigh bed with his thick down comforter.
And a portable phone.And two laptop computers - a Macintosh for drafting his work and a Windows machine for checking his e-mail.
"I got on 280 and just decided my car was too old to be driving in the horrible weather," said Neumayr, a San Francisco resident who works at the Burson-Marsteller public relations agency in San Mateo. "I have a feeling that quite a few people are telecommuting. I've done it when I've been sick or on weekends before, but not during the week."
This month's rainstorms are providing a quiet illustration of just how telecommuting has come of age, for Neumayr and thousands of other Bay area residents.
When the California Highway Patrol called on local residents to stay off the roads, many responded by packing up their laptops, file folders and cell phones and carting them off to work at home.
And they did so with little fanfare - no blue-ribbon business groups issuing proclamations about telecommuting, no human resource task forces giving them the official go-ahead.
"Telecommuting is no longer a special deal, the way it was during the 1989 earthquake," said Barney Olmsted, executive director of New Ways to Work, a San Francisco nonprofit that promotes flexible work arrangements.
The number of Americans working from home on an occasional basis has mushroomed during recent years. About 7.6 million people worked from home three or more days a month in 1997, up from 5.6 million in 1992, according to IDC/Link Resources in New York.
And the proportion of telecommuters in the Bay area probably is higher than the national average because of the large number of technology companies here.
Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard, for instance, says that 6 percent to 10 percent of its 67,000 U.S. employees work from home on a regular basis. Pacific Bell says that one-fourth of its California work force occasionally works from home.
During the past week, as heavy rains closed roads and gummed up traffic, many Bay area workers took advantage of telecommuting arrangements that they'd set up during less turbulent times.
At PeopleSoft in Pleasanton, the parking lot was only half-full on Friday due to the large number of people working from home.
"Usually, you have to get there between 7:30 and 8 a.m. to get a spot close enough so you don't get rained on," said PeopleSoft spokes-woman Tina Cox. "Today, I pulled in at 10 a.m. and got a prime spot."
And at Autodesk in San Rafael, there were only 50 of the usual 100 cars in the parking lot.
Mariann Layne, director of marketing services at Autodesk, opted to work at her home in Calistoga rather than face a treacherous two-hour commute.
That was easy for her to do because she already had a laptop and two phone lines at her house. And Autodesk is supportive of people working from home or other satellite locations, even when there are no rainstorms.
"I already work at home periodically, so it was convenient for me to do this," Layne said.
Jennifer Solow, creative director at the advertising agency of Kirschenbaum, Bond & Partners West, commandeered her husband's art studio for an office and then ran back and forth between two different rooms with separate phone lines.