Friday, January 8, 2010

Between a Rock and My Work Place

Most of the times when I’ve had to stay home from work because of my kids it hasn’t been much of a problem. It didn’t impact any important deadline, for example. Today, however, was an exception. I was scheduled to give a presentation to a group that included my boss and his boss, and this presentation was a precursor to presenting it to my boss’s boss’s boss and the Board of Directors, who are my boss’s boss’s boss’s bosses. You probably get the important points: 1) I’m pretty far down the chain at work, and 2) there were an awful lot of bosses involved.

Anyway, to make a long story short, Dave was stressing a bit this AM figuring out how to strike a balance between work and family whilst pleasing all those bosses. I ended up sending someone who works for me (yes, believe it or not, I, too, am a boss – the company org chart looks like the Transamerica building) to the meeting in my stead to run the PowerPoint computer, and I walked them through the slides via telephone. All things considered I think it went over pretty well, not counting the break I took in the middle to help a screaming K undo the button on his pants to use the bathroom.