If whatever I’m in the middle of can wait till tomorrow, it bloody well does. But sometimes, it can’t. Getting it done on time doesn’t “give me more power” or “carry other work benefits”… unless you count being employed as a benefit, that is :smack: I can assure you I do not enjoy having to ride the ass of my coworkers so they finally deliver me the goods at the time when I should have been able to shut the computer down, rather than having given me their parts two days before as agreed.
Okay, so you’re a great husband and father, your wife has tons of help, she loves staying home, you’re there all the time…yet your wife still has no sympathy for you when you’re tired. You asked us why we thought you’re getting, in your words, “the cold shoulder” and “about as much sympathy as if you had a hangover”. I suggested that perhaps she was feeling tired, overwhelmed and feeling a lack of sympathy from you in return for her efforts. You say no, everything is just dandy. I’ll bite - and I ask this with genuine interest, not sarcasm - since I am making assumptions about a perfect stranger (as are you, I might add), what do YOU think she is not more sympathetic and understanding of everything you’re going through?
As far as I can tell, it has something to do with basic attitudes toward employment, as I indicated in my OP, and others in the thread seem to support. There are some folks who regard every minute at the office as stealing time away from their “life”, whereas others who regard work as just another part of “life,” not to be mourned or despised–and even enjoyed, if possible. Don’t know what else I can say. :shrug: I’m interested in the answer myself . . . which is why I posed the question in the first place.
By the way, a big part of my job is . . . reading the newspaper. Oh noes!
Just come home every day and take over most of the child care duties, including your days off. You’ll get all the adoration you can stand, you’ll be a hero to your kids, and the sex will be fantastic. Yeah it will shave a few years off your life having to shoulder the burden, but so what, she’s going to outlive you anyway.
I think the attitude that wanting to spend time with your family is the same as hating your job is probably part of the problem. I freaking love my job. The company is awesome, the people are awesome, the work is challenging, etc. But you know what? At the end of the day it is just a job. It is what I do to pay the bills. I enjoy it but on my death bed I don’t think I will wish I spent more time at the office. If your wife has a similar attitude and you say you spent extra time at the office without communicating to her that it is an important work that can’t be put off that may well translate to, “I’d rather work on that project than play with my baby” and make her feel like she and your child come in second on your priority list.
Whoa, where did I ever say that?
I don’t think either of us are wrong here, nor is my wife (and we don’t have any real disagreements about this – it’s just a matter of mutual mystification). But do you acknowledge that not everybody feels this way & it’s not necessarily wrong to do so? If Steve Jobs or Warren Buffet told themselves when they were young that “I’m just doing this to pay the bills,” then . . . well, at this point they might still be living paycheck to paycheck worrying about paying their bills, wouldn’t they?
Koxinga, I took where you said, “There are some folks who regard every minute at the office as stealing time away from their “life”, whereas others who regard work as just another part of “life,” not to be mourned or despised–and even enjoyed, if possible.” to mean that you feel like the fact that she feels her home life is more important than work to mean that she mourns and despises the hours she would spend in the office. She probably enjoys working outside of the home and considers the time staying home with the baby sacrificing her resume for the good of her family. That doesn’t mean she can’t enjoy the hell out of that time with her kid, just that she places more importance on the family than the job and understands both the pros and cons that come with that. That is the same as people who go to work and really enjoy that time but think of it as a sacrifice they are making so that they can send their kid to private school or whatever.
And as far as whether or not I acknowledge whether or not everybody feels this way I will refer to what I said previously.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad or anything so please don’t misunderstand me. I’m just trying to point out to you why your wife might give you the cold shoulder when you complain about working late hours. Your original post asked if other people have these issues and what do they do about it and probably the best thing you can do is call home with plenty of warning that you will be working late and stress that what you are working on is important and can’t wait until the next day.
In addition I would mention to your wife that you feel like she is giving you the cold shoulder and ask her why. After all, this is all just internet speculation based on other people’s experiences and she might have a different reason all together for being a little upset. Maybe she is afraid you are going to the bar with the boys instead of working late like you said you would be or maybe she is afraid you’ve been killed in a car accident because you worked late without calling first. Talk to her and find out why she feels the way she does.
Nobody in this thread has said or implied any such thing. Several of us have said that extra time at work steals time from our family life, yes, but that is not at all the same thing and you bloody well know it. You are either just not listening, or you’re being willfully obtuse. Neither are attractive in a conversational partner, and both are even less attractive in a marriage partner, so I really hope that you pay more attention to your wife’s explanations than you apparently have to ours.
Yes, work is just a part of life. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it sucks, most times it’s somewhere in between. But the cold hard fact of the matter is that on days I work, I get maybe 5 hours to spend with my husband before I collapse in a little pile, most times more like 4. That’s if I get out on time, and you have to take time for making and cleaning up dinner, doing laundry, etc., out of that–actual time spent with neither of us working on anything is about 2.5-3 hours on any given work night. If I stay 30 minutes or an hour late, that cuts a pretty significant percentage off our time and it really sucks because he deserves better than a couple hours crammed in when I can work him in around my work schedule.
So yes, if I’m going to stay late for work, there is going to be a damn good reason why it can’t wait till tomorrow and they’re going to pay for the privilege of eating into my family time. Just like if I were to do family stuff during my allotted work time, my boss would expect there to be a damn good reason it couldn’t be done during my off-hours and would expect not to pay me for that time.
Well, I’m sure most of us would rather be doing other things than sitting in an office building all day. However you feel about it, unless you are independently wealthy, you still need to go to work and collect a paycheck. That’s why it seems a bit bizarre to me to come home and have your wife act all resentful as if you were spending the day at the beach or something.
If the OP’s wife, like me, has always been a “non-exempt” (hourly, eligible for overtime pay) employee when working for pay, then, yeah, I can see where she’s coming from a bit. My husband often comes home and says something like, “I didn’t get a break or a lunch all day!” and I know that I’m supposed to say something like, “You poor baby, you had a hard day,” but I have trouble coming up with that, because I’m thinking, “You idiot! Did you forget to eat or did you forget to remind these people you’re working with that you are a human being?” As an hourly employee who is “clocked out” for lunch, no one even expects me to work through lunch. What I do can wait. It would not be bravado to volunteer to work through lunch, but stupidity, since I wouldn’t be getting paid. For a SAHM, of course, you eat when you feed the kids. It’s a rather human job that way. Sometimes, you can even get a nap in.
For an hourly person, time=money. Overtime=extra money. Easy to see the tradeoff, even from the outside. You get less time with your family, but the family sees the financial benefit. Maybe a little less easy to see the benefit with salaried folks, especially with such stupidities as “face time” thrown in there. The benefit is mainly to the workplace itself. You see the benefit (since you work there) but your family does not, they just see that you are gone 14 hours a day working on that exciting new cover sheet to the TPS report while your dinner gets cold.
I have to hand it to the OP, though. At least he likes his job. My husband spent insane amounts of time at his last job, one he thoroughly despised, and that was, on a deep, primordial level, very insulting to me.
Yes. Ouch. Sounds like ‘grass is greener syndrome’ and, unless he’s taken time off to care for all the kids alone, she’s got a better grasp of the situation (although she probably has a somewhat warped memory of 9-to-5 work and I’m sure there are perks on both sides).
I’m not a teacher, but I’ve had teacher friends complain about this sort of mindset when it comes to budget discussions and even PTA meetings. I’ve also heard it from musicians a lot, especially now that everyone I know is getting married.
For anyone who works in design, you’ve got to love the Killer Jellyfish of Graphic Design Favors, including ‘website for sister-in-laws homemade candle operation’ and ‘gig poster for former frat brother’s weekend prog-rock band.’
Yes, I love what I do and getting paid for it is just the icing on the cake.
I feel like I’ve innocently walked into this room (first ten seconds or so).
See, this is what interests me – from my wife’s perspective (and that of other people I’ve known) there seems to be a pretty fixed formula of time vs. money, that if you put in X amount of hours you’re guaranteed X amount of dollars, no more and no less. At this point I’m kind of nostalgic for when things were that simple.
Also interesting to me that the intangible stuff gets so easily dismissed as “stupidities” and “exciting new cover sheet to the TPS report.” I’ve been hourly and I’ve been salaried (and I’ve been at home taking care of the kid for the majority of the time for some brief periods), so I think I can see both sides – but maybe for someone who’s always relied on an hourly wage, it’s harder to see . . .
Well, yes. That is how shift work, even salaried shift work, works. I come in for x hours and they pay me $y(x). If they want me there x+z hours, they’re going to pay me $y(x+z) or give me z comp hours.
And whatever it is they want me to stay late for had better be something fairly important. It’s one thing to cut into my allotted family time for an emergent patient, or to finish sterilizing packs we need for the next day, and something else again to cut into it for stuff that could just as easily wait till tomorrow. The former doesn’t really phase me at all, any more than it bothers me when DoctorJ’s pager goes off in the middle of dinner. It’s just part of the job to sometimes have to interrupt your personal life to do the needful. But the latter…the latter chaps the hell out of both of us. Staying late because somebody waltzes in 3 hours late for their appointment, or because there’s some piffling little thing that JUST HAS to get done RIGHT NOW even though there is absolutely no benefit to rushing around doing it now…that is stupid bullshit and I truly resent cutting into my family time for stupid bullshit.
Of course, we’re neither of us concerned with “intangibles” like getting in good with the boss or clawing our way up the corporate ladder. If you are concerned with such things…well, it sounds like a personal choice, to me, and one that predictably leads to having to sometimes work completely exhausting days. And I don’t really feel like any of us deserve huge loads of sympathy for the completely predictable results of our personal choices. As a guess, that may be why you get about as much sympathy as you would for a hangover.
I’m a management consultant. My entire job is “intagibles”. All I do all day is work with other people to think of different ways to make businesses run better and create decks (Powerpoint presentations) to try and sell those ideas to clients.
It’s easy to say jobs like mine don’t “do” anything by hourly wage types because we are looking at a much bigger picture.
I’ve heard it said that you guys are in the business of borrowing other people’s watches to tell them the time . . .