Category: Working

The other side of working from home

We constantly hear about pros and cons of working from home, but all of this is coming from the point of view of either the employer or the employee. No point of view from the other people who share the same home.

My husband had a period of working from home many years ago when our children were small, we had 3 kids in elementary school and a dog. House was semi quiet from kid noise in the mornings, however as I was a stay at home mom at that point, this was my prime homework time – vacuuming, cleaning, cooking and such. My experience of working from home as the other person in the house was terrible. His office space was the kitchen, this meant stopping the dishwasher as it was too noisy during his meetings and forgetting to turn it on again, no vacuuming as he had phone calls, using the kitchen was impossible. I hated it! I was very happy when he switched jobs and worked back from the office full time.

And then the pandemic started and we all worked from home and had to navigate space, phone calls and everything else. Granted this time around our kids are adults, but with everyone returning home for a while we managed, in the begining with one dog and then with two.

This year the house started to empty again as workers returned to the office, however my husband still works from home.His company does not seem keen on returning back to the office for whatever corporate reason they have. How does that affect me, you ask? We work opposite hours, i have been relegated to the downstairs in the mornings. Our dog is not allowed to bark as it interrupts meetings , i am not allowed to sing in the shower and not because i am off key. Vacuuming is still not allowed during zoom calls, using the blender is not allowed, singing in the kitchen is not allowed and I’m not even talking about listening to music, at least in this aspect I am lucky as my hearing aids have bluetooth and it streams straight to my ears. But my home balance is off, i am a guest who is too afraid to interrupt during the day.

My point of view is if you do not let your employees back in the office then you must endure barking dogs and human activity in the house. Be reasonable as an employer about what the expectation is for working from home if you refuse to give a work from the office alternative. Not all of us have big houses with dedicated office space, most of us have normal size houses and live in a suburban town with shared spaces, with neighborhood kids screaming outside, our own dogs barking and the other humans in the house living. I know some work from home is great, but have you ever stopped to ask how the others in the shared space feel about this? Sage (our dog) and i just want to bark at the amazon, ups, fedex drivers, i really don’t want to vacuum but i don’t want to be forced to have 5 minutes break between zoom class to clean a space and really i do want to sing out loud and not only in the shower!

The barking one

Is quiet firing really new?

This Labor day morning I was enjoying my morning coffee when an article caught my eye, the title of the article was “quiet firing”, we all heard about the great resignation & quiet quitting so naturally i had to read it as it intrigued my curiosity.

Quiet firing means that an employer will make your work life miserable by demoting, adding extra unpaid work and generally mistreating you  so you will quit, this way the employer does not have to pay you severance as they did not fire you. There is no need to prove that your performance was bad,  involving HR or paper work. 

The article spoke about this as a new trend, but as being employed for many years, I know it has always been there. We have all seen it in our professional life and sadly general life. Instead of quiet firing we all need to call it in its true name – a hostile work environment .

This is not caused by one person, the article kept talking about the work place’s behavior, but workplaces/ companies are not some anonymous entity, they are built with people who are not only demonstrating bad leadership but are also letting the rest of their employees know that they are condoning it. Should we stay and suffer? Look for a new job while being mistreated or just start speaking about it publicly? I have no answers as each person has their own decision to make.

I took the scenic route!


Some people take the shortest way possible, it has many advantages.
However with life and things unexpected we might sometimes have to take the long way.
I personally prefer to call it the scenic route, I started my MBA journey many years ago, had to stop for a while to prioritize, went back to school during the pandemic and finally completed my last class this past December, 25 years after I started.
I learned a lot during my in between years, but mostly that it’s never too late to go back to school and it’s never too late to go to school.
It might have been a long route, but personally after finishing my last class – it was the scenic one! #mba

Yes, I have an accent.

I have been recently told that i have an accent, frankly i wasn’t surprised as I assumed everyone has an accent. Having lived in several countries and being able to converse in several languages my accent situation, quite frankly, was a sure bet.

I am used to people asking me where I am from, they never like my initial answer as it is always the town I currently live in. Of course those who ask me are never satisfied as they always inquire further- but where are you originally from? I have been known to reply from earth and even ask back why you are asking me. This usually gets a reply – cause you have an accent, and yes I do have one.

When I do disclose my country of origin, I get – but you don’t look it, I’m never sure what they really mean when they say that. I do look human most days. My daughter was asked the same question recently, she replied with the California town she was born in and the person who asked persisted with a before that, her response was from my mother’s womb (she does get the snarkiness from me). When she asked why they were asking she was told she has an accent.

But I digress, the person who told me I have an accent had an accent themselves, a quite thick what I would describe as a foreign accent, or better yet an accent that is foreign to me, an accent that was very hard for me to understand with my very technological hearing aids. And no I didn’t reply back what about your own accent.

My workplace is multicultural, between all of us we have more than 15 languages spoken and we all have some form of accent, does it change our friendship and mutual respect, no! In fact it enriches us

But my main point is that we all have accents, whether we are from California, Louisiana or any place else in the world, why does it matter that we have an accent? My personal thought on this whole issue was , yes I have an accent because I am multilingual as so are most of the people who have accents, but the fact I have one does not reflect on my life, my work, my friends or anything about me besides the fact that I am fluent in several languages and frankly asking someone with an accent where they are from is rude, unnecessary and definitely not embracing diversity.