I work part time in a job that I love. I should work 3 x 6 hour days a week and it is perfect for dropping the kids at kinder/daycare and school on my way to work. Working these hours means I can also be there for school pick up at the end of the day. Note that I said these are the hours that I should work. Lately I have been working closer to 4 full days a week and dragging the kids along to various meetings and projects. Now my bosses are great and they don’t want me to work too many hours overtime, nor do they want me coming in to work on my days off and if I do work too much they encourage me to take days off in lieu but as I said, I love this job and if I didn’t work the hours the projects that I love wouldn’t succeed and it wouldn’t be as much fun.
Anyway, to get to the point, after working far too many hours this month, I decided that I had nothing urgent to do on Monday so I decided to take the day off to spend with man-child, just to celebrate him finishing his old job and having a week off before starting again. We had a great day at the movies and generally relaxing.
So I arrived a work Tuesday ready for a productive day of projects only to find a message that my team was required to produce an urgent report documenting what we have done and what we were planning on doing for the remainder of the year, as well as outlining the internal resources required, the percentage of our time expended and all partnerships both internal and external. Not so hard really, but as I was the only member of the team in (there are 3 of us in the office) I had to produce a report that would cover all of our movements, as well as the days work that was already booked – an hour long planning meeting and 2 hours of project development. Oh and by the way, we need it by tomorrow, lunchtime at the latest!
Hmmm, 3 hours to do about 6 or more hours of work when I will be working offsite on the day the report was due, hooray. I copied all the files I needed to the laptop (of course I can’t network my pc!) and took the work with me to the kids dance class. After the kids were in bed I worked on it some more, until 11 o’clock. OK, so I effectively worked the entire 6 hours that I had taken off the previous day. I also worked from home for hours yesterday and a little more today. My boss did call me today, apologising profusely for calling me on my day off, but it was to tell me that he had rearranged our meetings on Monday, so I could take the day off! Did I mention that my bosses rock too?
So now I don’t have to officially work on Monday but I will do a few hours from home as I welcome the builders who will begin our renovations. It should be the start of fantastic times – the renovations start again, man-child starts his new job and I am still excited about work.
