If you don’t know, I’m a programmer. I was downsized in ’06 and I started a programming consultancy out of my house. Now I stay home with my triplet seven year olds and singleton five year old. It worked out great and I’m making about the same as I was when I was fulltime corporate in Los Angeles. And now I don’t have to commute.
The way it works is that I watch the kids during the day while my wife, a school teacher, works from 8 a.m. to about 4 p.m. When she gets home I can go full bore into programming mode if I have to, or I just work late into the night.
While the kids are in school I can do some work, make phone calls through our business phone, go to the occasional meeting, that sort of thing. When the kids are home and the wife is still at work, it’s almost impossible to get anything done. Sometimes I just have to do some work even if they’re home. Today I had to conference call with a client. I was at home, they were on a speaker phone in there conference room many miles away. It went something like this:
The kids were somewhere in the house playing. I called at the designated time, exchanged pleasantries with the group and we all got down to business. Then my daughter Rose burst into my office.
“Dad!”, she yelled, “Matthew just farted in our bedroom! It was sooo bad we all had to stop playing and leave!”
“I DIDN’T FART!”, screamed little Matthew as he came running in behind her. “IT WAS JOSEPH!”
“Nuh uh!”, said Joseph as he and Michael joined the group in my office. “It wasn’t me! It was Matthew!”
I tried not laugh as I excused myself for a second from the call.
“Stop this right now, daddy’s working!”, I said to the kids. “Matthew is a little boy, how bad could it possibly have been?”
“It was really bad!”, said Joseph.
“And Loud!”, said Rose.
“Like one of yours!”, said Michael.
I could hear the laughter over the phone from the client’s conference room. The company was a really good one and all of the people I dealt with were great.
“Ah, the joys of working at home!”
This is not a photo of the author of this column, rather a generic man working from home.
Image courtesy of iShane