This is the day, right?
Let’s have a moment of silence for auntie em.
Our thoughts are with you. Also our excessive curiosity.
The idea behind TYKTWD is great - however, kids can’t stand eight or nine hours of Mommy or Daddy being in conference calls and preparing the TPS report. So its “show you the desk and then have a field trip” day where the kids get to get a day off school and do fun things at Mommy or Daddy’s work - which is completely what it isn’t supposed to be. We don’t have ponies at my job…! Talk about giving kids an unrealistic idea of work - I haven’t gotten to work with glitter and glue sticks ever.
The thing I don’t like is that they schedule it during the school year. I am not letting my kids miss a day of school. Why can’t they do it during the summer? My kids are old enough that they can help me…take this over there, get that off the printer, this is why I do this, let’s go talk to my boss about that, etc. But not during the school year.
I’ve been seeing a bunch of kids trailing around downtown after their parents, but so far there have not been any in the office thank god. I think I dodged the bullet on this one.
Wait a second - is this a national thing? Are there kids going to work all over the U.S. as we speak? (Heh - that sounded kind of funny - time for those little darlings to start earning their keep. 
)
I’m not sure if I should tell you all the other rules but you should know the fifth rule.
Although it’d be worth having an office overrun with rugrats just to hear ONE child scream “PC LOAD LETTER? What the FUCK does that mean?”.
Yes, it’s a national holiday on the same level as “Secretary appreciation day” and other silly things. When I was little, my parents worked for IBM, who’d set up a whole bunch of things for the kids to learn about that were pertinent to their parents’ work. I saw my first touch screen there at least a decade before they started to become a regular thing, and there were a lot of machines and workshops that we could take tours of. However, in the last year or so of me going to work with my parents, it became a “take your kid to work and stick them in an adjacent office with a computer hooked up to the ethernet” day. I took a nap in the middle of the day that time.
Might be a better idea for those companies that are not a hazard to have children in to make it a half-day tour and luncheon type thing, then take the kids to school for the other half of the day.
ETA: Oh, also, this was originally intended for little girls to learn about all the job opportunities that they will have that their mothers may not have had. Somehow all children got incorporated into this as it went along.
Haven’t seen one little sproglet yet today, and I know there’s at least a few.
At my antepenultimate job, we had such a day. One little girl decided that watching her mother stare into a computer screen was booooooorinnnnng, but watching me stare into a computer screen was kewl. At the end of three – Very. Long. – hours, I had a new desktop wallpaper. “KAYLEIGH” in large pink letters on a bright green background. I also had managed to aquire an enormous headache.
Here in Cincinnati the teachers balked and so now there’s no official day. My company hosts it in the summer.
I would spend the day in a traditional involuntary babysitter activity: enhancing their vocabulary.
You can either take the risky route and teach them rude words. The Beavis and Butthead sampler is always good for this.
Or you can teach them words that don’t exist and give them random meanings. This is also a perfectly cromulent choice.
Either way, make sure the little monkeys learn something.
You can also do as my babysitter did when I was a child and teach them to smoke, another time-honoured tradition. Maybe even drink a little; it’s really up to you.
Any word from her yet? Any news reports of mass killings?
Nothing on CNN…
I’m alive! I’m alive! Hallelujah!
But I knocked out for two solid hours the moment I got my ass home. :eek: I might still be asleep, if SkipMagic hadn’t called to make sure I’d survived . . .
Thank you for the kind thoughts, the moment of silence, and all of the suggestions on how to avoid doing this in the future (I think the “Aborted Fetus In A Jar” plan wins)!
At any rate, it wasn’t as awful as I thought. I figured we’d be in for a little kiddie revolt when the activities we’d planned for them didn’t turn out to be “cool” enough. And in fact, they were probably NOT cool enough, because one member of our team had her daughter (whom we all know and love) participate, and she was pretty honest (though not rude - she’s a doll) with us about what she liked and didn’t like. So we were kinda lame, but the other kids didn’t complain. Not aloud, or to US, anyway.
Oh, and we weren’t HORRIBLY outnumbered, because there were eight adults and 48 kids. Well, 47, after one kid walked out. (Turned out he’d informed one of the adults present that his mother - who works on the maintenance staff - would be cleaning in the area, and he might just go hang with her. I, however, missed the memo, and so when I saw him leave I thought he must be going to the bathroom; 10 minutes later, when he hadn’t returned, I was fighting a rising tide of panic and had visions of lawsuits dancing in my head. I was damn close to bombarding the mens’ room. I did share my concerns with several of my cohorts (which is how I found out that one of them actually knew the score), but nobody really seemed concerned. One even surmised that he was probably just overly fascinated with the hand dryer in the restroom. But I digress.)
At any rate, I’m glad it’s over, and am wondering what I can do to get OFF of this team before TYKTWD comes around next year!
One interesting thing I discovered, though: BigWig’s daughter, that I mentioned in the OP? Very quiet, polite, unassuming, plain, and really, rather nerdy. She didn’t want her picture taken (we did a fun photo thing that had the kids practically knocking each other down), was wearing rather plain and matronly clothing (especially compared to the other girls her age), a “practical” (as opposed to “stylish”) haircut, and kept to herself most of the time. Her interesting “hidden side” came out in the course of the afternoon, though, and it seems she has a great fondness for NBA stars and muscle cars.
The middle management kids, however, were the spoiled brats! Again, none of the kids was HORRIBLE, but the middle management offspring were the ones who were wearing the expensive, “show-off” clothes (one of the girls was wearing $200 jeans!) leaving plates of half-eaten food behind at the various “activity stations” for us to pick up (one kid would get handfuls of Oreos, eat the cream centers out, then leave the plate full of wafers somewhere in his wake and start over again), spilling soda and failing to alert anyone (a whole table of girls just kept right on working around a huge puddle of Sprite), shoving each other out of the way to get to things they wanted, hogging the spotlight, and so on.
Then, of course, there was the maintenance worker’s kid, who just plain left.
I’m sure there’s a workplace parallel that can be drawn there, but I’m too damn tired.
At any rate, I suh-VIVED, and now I feel like She-Ra.
Wow. The general idea of the whole concept. Mind boggling. 
Crazy, innit?
Well the kids dress for the parents they want, not the parents they have.
You may have survived, but I’m sure either some of your brain or some of your soul died today.
In your honor, I accused one of my single table tournaments of being the children there on BYCTWD and where the HELL were their parents? They were a fun and rowdy bunch and yes, cheddar goldfish were involved. 
Glad you survived, Auntie, we Aunt’s gotta look out for each other. (BTW, Strep throat or Pink Eye is always a good excuse)
I agree with them. I’d take the kid home after lunch. The whole idea is pretty goddamn stupid.