• Posted By landismom @ 10/12/2005 03:38:00 PM • • •
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
off the clock?
I’m spending a day at the car dealership, because the fan of my car started to make a horrible noise last week. And then it started to make a horrible smell. And I still had to drive about 300 miles, before I could bring it in for service. Not fun.
Turns out, there were approximately 6,000 parking stubs that had fallen into my engine and were blocking the fan, some of which were scorched. Which required the mechanic to not only pull apart the dashboard, but also to take apart the blower. Time consuming AND expensive, my favorites! And of course, they also found some other things wrong—the water pump is leaking, and I need new tires. It’s a small miracle that the engine hasn’t caught fire, evidently. Sigh. I wouldn’t mind so much, if they just had free wi-fi here, but their network is password-protected.
And I have been able to get a lot of work done, since I’m not spending a bunch of time commenting on other people’s blogs. But now? I’m ready to go. Unfortunately, the car, she is not ready yet.
In a funny way, I was actually looking forward to spending the day here. One of the things I know about myself is that I’m pretty stressed out, when doing an errand that I would usually consider a pain in the ass comes to seem like a vacation day. I first recognized this phenomenon when I was in college, and I had to go to the gynecologist for my annual pelvic exam. When the act of concentrating on something outside of my day-to-day life starts to seem relaxing—even a not-very-relaxing situation like a pelvic? Well, that’s a bad sign.
One of the things that I really dislike about my current work situation is that there is absolutely no boundary between on-the-clock and off-the-clock. If you work from home, then in a sense, you’re always at work. I think nothing of checking my work email at 11 p.m., or listening to my voicemail at 6 in the morning. And since I don’t have a ‘work’ phone number—just a cell phone—in theory, I’m always reachable. I say in theory, of course, because there are certainly times when I just will not answer the phone. And I think that makes me unusual among my co-workers. I work with a lot of other people who work out of their homes, too—it’s the norm in our organization. And there is definitely this sort of over-compensation that goes on, as people want to make sure that everyone knows how hard they are working, even though they don’t go in to an office every day. There are a few of us—mostly working parents—who set hard limits on things. One of mine is that I will not talk to you between the hours of 6-8 p.m., no matter who you are. I can’t even tell you how popular my 8 p.m. conference calls make me with the childless staff!
I thought about taking personal time today to deal with my car, but in reality, I am doing the same exact thing here that I would do at home—I’ve been on the phone for at least an hour, I’ve written like 25 emails (although I can’t send them yet). I’m editing documents. In short, I’m working—I’m just not doing it at my desk. And since my desk is normally located in my dining room, it doesn’t seem like that big a leap, to my desk is a couch at the auto shop. I mean, some people work at coffee shops, right? Is this different?
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