Working from home, the real-life edition

January 19, 2012 by bananas

When Seattle gets anywhere above 1cm of snow, everyone in our office works from home. Or, as they call it on the street, WFH.

The first day that it happened, I woke up to a beautiful sparkly white blanket covering the yard and street and I was excited. Oh boy! I thought, Lucky me… A whole day to sit in my brand-new kitchen nook and sip coffee, with the occasional break to walk down to the park and build a snowman with CJ. How lovely.

So that was Monday. But then it snowed AGAIN today and things started to turn… ugly.

The thing about working from home is that it works really well when I don’t really need to work. But when I actually have stuff that I need to get done, WFH might as well stand for WICKEDLY FRUSTRATING HOUSE-ARREST.

It starts at 7am. CJ is pulling on my arm. “Mommy, mommy, I want you to make me breakfast.” Then ten minutes later, “Mommy I can’t find my BOOTS! Where are my BOOTS?” and then “MY SOCK HAS A BUMP!” and a few minutes later, “Mommy, I can’t find my glove, where is my GLOVE?!” followed by several refrains of “Mommy come outside with meeeeee,” and “I’m BORED!”

At 8:30 Jay is still in bed, which is solid evidence that he has no sense for looming danger. He’ll never know how close he came to an ice pick through the eye. If we had an ice pick.

It goes on like that all day, with CJ interrupting me every 3.74 minutes, on average.

It’s enough to make a good woman go bad.

Throughout the day, my childless coworkers send me instant messages that say things like,

THIS IS SO FANASTIC! I’M GETTING SO MUCH DONE!

while my coworkers who have children send messages like,

I AM GOING TO KILL SOMEONE!

GET ME OUT OF THIS PLACE!

HEADS WILL ROLL TONIGHT!

Ok, so it was me sending those last three messages. Don’t judge.

This is all a very long and round-about way of saying that

…Yes, I know that the three inches that we got today is still mostly there. Plus a layer of freezing rain.

…Ok, so I’ve heard that the forecast calls for more snow overnight.

…Sure, the odds of this all melting and the roads being clear and free tomorrow morning are slim to none.

Still. I vow and solemnly swear that I will go to work tomorrow.

Even if I have to fashion snowshoes out of dental floss and weaving looms.

I will trudge the 4 miles up and down hills and over bridges through the snow-covered city.

And I. Will. Go. To. Work.

(does anyone have an extra weaving loom?)

***

Update: I wrote this post last night. Then, I woke up this morning to SEVERE ICE STORM WARNINGS.

Everybody’s tweeting about the trees, which are cracking apart under a thick coat of ice, the roads, which are slicker than snot, and the power, which is out. Over 100,000 homes are without electricity, and our lights keep flickering. It’s snowing again. And The Washington State Patrol tweeted this:

Working from home, the real-life edition

Related Posts:

4 Comments