National Post (National Edition)
So this is what my wife does at work
Two rooms over from where I sit during the workday, my wife is on the phone, having intense discussions with a colleague. It is a comprehensive talking-to, and I can almost feel the person on the other end blushing from here.
This is unusual, but only the tenor of the conversation. She is constantly in some sort of conversation, perpetually talking to someone on the phone for her job, and often talking to several someones at a time. Two-plus months into the Work From Home Pandemic, we are adjusting to the fact that we are, quite literally, all up in each other’s business. I cannot say that I have learned much more about what my wife, Sue, actually does, just that I know an awful lot more about how she does it.
It’s one of the weird consequences of this time. Households across the land have been converted into multiuse office pods, complete with cafeteria space and unisex toilets. Remember those stories about the Silicon Valley companies that built all kinds of hip workspaces for their employees, with the outdoor meeting space and the boardroom full of beanbag chairs and the collaborative café? These are now called the kitchen, the living room and the backyard.
And so, we now share these spaces in unusual ways and in so doing discover the work traits of our spouses and loved ones: the dad jokes and the indecipherable lingo, the self-talking mumblers and the confrontation avoiders, and the fact that some people think nothing of booking a conference call at 7:30 in the actual morning. If there are birds chirping in the background, you have booked your call too early.
I worked from home a fair bit before any of this started. There were days when I wrote from an arena or practice facility, and days on the road, and for most other times I keep an office, hard by the laundry room and with a view of the neighbours’ fence. Which is also our fence, come to think of it.
Sue was very much not a work-from-home person. She works in project management, and when people ask me what that means I say that she manages projects. Or at least she did, some years ago. Now she manages the people who manage projects at one of the big Canadian banks. There are the people who must develop and execute the various technological products that keep a big business operating, and then there are the people who keep all those projects organized and running on schedule. Nerd-wranglers, to use a term I invented.
What this means in practice is that she spends all day on calls. Where once she went from meeting to meeting to meeting in a Toronto office tower, now all that work is done on conference calls.
“Hi, who joined the call?” “Hi, who joined?”
“Hi, who joined the call?” At which point I get up and make sure my office door is closed. I am not unfamiliar with distracting environments, having worked in newsrooms amid the clamour of a major news event and more recently in press seats set among roaring crowds.
But my wife’s work presents a different kind of distraction. There are status updates and touch points, and many other phrases that I’m pretty sure are just fancy terms for “meeting,” and there is a lot of talk of decks and timelines and implementations and other things that I do not understand. Occasionally there will be evident friction, which brings a pang of pity for someone who has not done what was asked and is flailing about for the correct excuse. Sometimes I will wince as the person seizes on what they think is a good response, knowing that she will bat this away and continue to press her point. (The secret is that there is no good excuse. Just take your lumps and move on.)
For a time, the workspace in our home was divided this way: I had the office, and she had everywhere else. Sue would move from the couch to the kitchen to a treadmill, one call blending seamlessly into the next.
“Sorry, I have to drop off.” “Hi, who joined?”
As it now seems like it could be several more months before her downtown office is back to pre-pandemic levels of occupancy, Sue has dropped the nomadic life and set up a desk in an upstairs bedroom, complete with a nice ergonomic chair. It is the workfrom-home equivalent of a head-office relocation. SueInc used to be right across the street from my office, now it’s way across town. It’s only been a few days, but it’s a weird realization of what had quickly become normal. I don’t hear much of anything from the various people who I have never met and who were starting to feel like my co-workers. What of their kids? What of their dogs?
I’ll have to start making a point of heading across town, as it were, for updates.
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