Tag: work from home

How flexible work destroyed work life balance

Once upon a time people would finish their work day, pack up their stuff and go home. There was separation between work and home at least for most of us. Lunch time at work was sacred and you got to eat in peace and when you went home you watched TV, ate dinner with your family or just did whatever worked for you on your off hours. Granted some jobs required you to be on call or have late evenings.

Then came the pandemic and most of us went home. A lot of companies discovered that now they can have meetings galore, there is no need for everyone to be physically in the same space anymore. We can have meetings with people in other countries any time needed. Online meetings were the new god! Don’t get me wrong, not dressing up was a blessing for me and I loved the fact that I could cook when a meeting was boring. I even took advantage of the online all hours format and finally finished my MBA from an international school waking up at 5am for class. 

But what happens when you work for an international company that has meetings all hours – with countries that have 10- 16 hours time differences. Some that I know have meetings scheduled for them at 7am and then again at 9pm or as my friend says, I know when China and India start working as the meets pinging starts. When do employees have a chance to decompress and relax? 

This is not the only problem, employees are expected to be available at all times. If you have small children and don’t mind the weird work hours that is not a problem for you. But what happens with everyone else, the meetings keep being scheduled as everyone is supposedly available, family life is pushed to the side and balance does not exist. 

Some employers are great and respect boundaries but what happens when there are no boundaries. Work life balance does not exist anymore and if anything work and those annoying meet pings on the phone become worse.

Embracing the yoga pants look

I discovered lately that once your kids are grown up and are no longer in the house you are no longer considered a disheveled mom. Apparently at this point, just like a Pokémon you evolve and become just a regular frumpy human being. Technically you haven’t changed, you just no longer have the excuse of why you are disheveled, you are no longer juggling getting kids ready for school, after school activities, grocery shopping or play dates. You have no excuses anymore. 

Well in theory you have no excuses but in reality I can come up with many excuses for my disheveled look. I am only going to the gym or the grocery store, I’m just walking the dog. It’s dark no one knows who I am anyway. See I told you I have excuses galore.

I always admired and was a little jealous of those who are  all put together at 8am,color coordinated and dressed up to the T, a situation that I have to admit I never was in by choice. This is an ability that is really beyond my capabilities and will never be achieved unless I am on my 4th cup of coffee. To those of you who wonder if I look like crap all the time, don’t worry. For  work I dress like a professional. However, once at home my  preferred attire of yoga pants and a ratty t-shirt is back on.  Especially that these days yoga pants have pockets.

When I was younger and childless I was always dressed nice and all put together even in my college years. Somewhere during the first pregnancy I switched the high heels and dressy clothes with comfort and never went back. And now in my 50’s I doubt it will be different.

So today I am owning my frumpy look and even embracing it outside my work hours, but if you see me wearing a velour tracksuit stop me immediately , that is too far gone even for me.

That dreaded training session

Today I had corporate training. Usually i get the notification that I have scheduled training I cringe, I hate training sessions, they are usually long, not efficient and not effective. I really do not enjoy them partially because they are on zoom and I need to be  in front of the computer for way too long for my cup of tea. However, today was a first for me.

I attended the training, complaining in my mind about it and then I was pleasantly surprised. Training was good and interesting and I actually enjoyed it, which brought me to think how was this training better? Especially since this was technical IT training that usually burns my brain to a crisp.

The difference was that this session was concise, effective and to the point with real tech examples and know-how. The trainer was not going on and on just to hear her own voice like some people I know. I left the training feeling that I gained knowledge and not wasted my time on another mandated session.

So why was this online training better, for starters it started on time and there was no wait for all the late attendees. Presentation was good and showed real examples that we encountered and solutions and not some theoretical mambo jambo that does not connect to us.The session was short, effective and efficient and I personally felt that the trainer valued my time and was not doing this training just to fulfill some corporate mandate. And lastly this trainer knew how to use the technology, in this case it was Zoom. I attended a training session last week with a trainer that wasted 20 minutes of our time not knowing how to share screens or look at the chat and frankly after the last 3 years of life in zoom if you have not mastered it yet get a moderator to help you. So all in all a good start for my work day!

Why I started blogging

I was asked recently why I am starting a blog, there are many reasons. One of my friends mother passed away recently and when they organized the house later they found notebooks filled with stories and poems that the mom never showed anyone and they decided to publish them after her death, I don’t want my kids to read my notebooks after I’m dead, I want them to see them now, I want the world to see them now,

The other reason was the pandemic, in a way the pandemic made me think about my priorities and what I would like to do in the remaining years that I have. I lost my hearing during the pandemic and that added to my introspection time, I started listening to podcasts while walking the dog and discovered Mike Rowe’s podcast (yes. The Dirty Jobs guy), on several episodes he had his mother Peggy Rowe, Peggy spoke about her road to becoming on the national bestseller list and how she fulfilled her dream and all the ups and downs that led to that and that inspired me to no end.

The other reason that might seem mundane is just a simple quote from Farrah Gray “Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.” that was posted on Linkedin. This post made me stop for a second and  think hard as it  touched a nerve. I have worked for other people all my life, not always were my capabilities appreciated  and when they were I was expected to do more for the same pay while someone else reaped the rewards. Mind you I quit from that company after I saw that my hard work was not appreciated but that belongs to a different post about toxic management. 

All of these reasons plus several others that I did not mention made me think and think hard about how I would like my future to look like, i do not want to miss opportunities or reflect in years to come on how I missed them. I know many of us have the same feelings, especially after the last 3 years we had, at this point in my life I am choosing to forge ahead with a new view – I will not stop myself anymore, I will believe in my capabilities and if ever my bucket list if full  I will simply get a new bucket!

The difference of perspective

My husband recently discovered that our dog knows how to get water from the fridge, the rest of us knew that she could do it at 5 months old so when he came to  tell us we all shrugged our shoulders and said what else is new.

Our dog is wicked smart from a breed of self sufficient and smart dogs that was used during world war one to send messages, the breed used to be police dogs as well, but they are very independent and don’t always or really rarely listen unless they want to.

But I digress, my husband was very shocked that she can do this, while we all knew about this for 5 years, and started getting very worried about all the other stuff she knows to do and how much damage she can do. The rest  of us looked at him and smiled, not because we think her eating chairs is funny or because she knows how to use a fridge, but we saw this as a sign of intelligence and were trying to figure out – how can we use her abilities for the good while my husband only saw the negative aspects of her capability and all this is a matter of perspective.

Thoughts during walks 10/3/22

I live in a suburban neighborhood, families, kids walking to school or riding their bikes, dogs being walked everywhere. We have big dog poop trash cans and dog bag dispensers everywhere. There are so many dispensers that you can almost always find a bag. There are some instances that the dispenser is empty for some reason or another but they are really far between. In our many years here I think this happened only twice.

We have a neighbor who walks her dog every morning and passes by my house on the way. I know this for several reasons, my dog really hates her dog, no rhyme or reason she just hates that dog so when they pass my chief barking officer starts. If for some reason my chief barking officer forgot to bark I still know when she  passed by as she always carries a gazillion dog poop bags and leaves them on her trail like  Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs so they can be found. I never understood people who carry that many bags or feel the need to grab all the  bags in the dispenser. Even on any of my dogs’ bad days there really was no need for more than 4 bags max, you can also buy bags on Amazon, pretty cheap as well. I bought a huge box 4 years ago for probably 10 dollars that I still have.

Going  back to the dog poop bag situation and knowing very well that I am weird, everytime I see these bags all over the path we take on our walks I wonder- why have so many bags if you leave them all over the place? Or better yet, what is the need to grab so many bags out of the dispenser when there are dispensers everywhere?  Does the woman have bag anxiety?

 Most days I just pick up the bags that she leaves all over the place and just put them in my pocket without even realizing it (thank god for yoga pants with side pockets), today i actually felt good about the bags all over the sidewalks, I haven’t seen the dog’s owner for several days and didn’t realize that , I know she lives somewhere in the neighborhood but not exactly where, but  this way i knew she was ok. Yes, we do  have a neighborhood busybody who knows everyone and everything and I will catch her later to see if everything is ok  and if our bag lady needs anything.

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.

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.