Don’t get me wrong. I like kids. I don’t have any of my own, which is perhaps why I find the ones that belong to other people fun and entertaining. If you’re my friend and you have a kid, I am more often than not happy to have your kid along when we spend time together, etc.
However, I gotta say, I’m a little bitter by this whole Take Your Kids To Work Day - or, rather, by the way my company is handling it, which is basically to designate the team on which I work as Official TYKTWD Babysitters. We have been ahem “asked” (read: cattle-prodded up the collective ass until we agreed) to provide an afternoon of snacks, entertainment, and activities for kids who come to work with their parents tomorrow. At the same time, we’ll be picking their little brains about what kinds of activities, entertainment, and products they actually enjoy, to get a little more insight on the “Mommy & Daddy’s Dime” market segment.
All well and good I suppose (though isn’t the idea of Take Your Kids to Work Day supposed to be that YOUR child(ren) can see what YOU do after you drop them off at school - to prove to them that no, Mommy/Daddy is not, in fact, spending all day in a bar, licking peanut dust off of other peoples’ nipples like Grandma sometimes suggests?), so we sucked it up, and planned three hours of post-lunch fun for kids whose parents RSVPed to our e-mail invitation by Monday.
Can you see where this is going?
So today, I cancelled a long-time-planned lunch at a lovely Indian place with two lovely friends (well, one lovely and one neurotic, but enjoyable nonetheless) to attend a 3-hour meeting (the second of its kind) to plan and prepare for tomorrow’s 3-hour kid-fest which, according to our RSVP list, would involve about 28 kids (we were actually quite selective about which departments received the invite, so it didn’t go company wide - we know our limits, man).
And then.
Turns out one of THEEEE Big Cheese Weenies at this company (I mean Founding Family Big Cheese) started making calls to find out if there was anywhere he could dump his daughter - I mean, anywhere he could have his administrative assistant dump his daughter - I mean, any kid-friendly activities planned in which he could encourage his daughter to participate tomorrow.
And long story short, one person asked another person, who asked another person, etc., etc., until finally someone was reached who knew about our little 3-hour gig. Then the news travelled all - the - way - back - up the “information trail”, and by the time it reached Big Wig Station, six more kids were aboard the bus.
Now I hear tell we’re getting close to 50.
We’ve totally changed venues now, and I’m damn sure we don’t have near enough glitter and glue sticks anymore.
Everybody’s freaking out.
I dread walking into work tomorrow.
