My wife and I check in usually once a day just to say hi and cover five minutes worth of important or meaningless drivel. I typically leave the house before she and the kids are awake, so she’ll call me late morning just to make sure I didn’t get into a car accident on the way in and I’m not lying in a ditch somewhere. We’ll also occasionally text each other once or twice. I have my own office so I’m not bothering anyone, and I come in early and leave later than everyone else, so there’s little danger of a complaint of unproductivity.
On the other hand, I usually have a 20-40 minute call with my brother once a week.
People are all very different. My cousin and his wife used to talk to each other multiple times per day…every time he had a break from work, he was expected to call home. We’d all stand around the phone waiting for his call. And at lunch. And on the way home.
They were more than a little co-dependent.
On the other hand there is what I like to term interdependent, or rather, love. I text my SO back and forth all day long if we both have time. It used to be e-mail. We rarely call each other though, so it’s not disruptive to the other people. Neither of us “need” to do it, and on the days we can’t, we don’t have any problems. It’s just nice.
We text or email for numerous reasons but rarely more than once a day. Calls are for urgent issues or tech support. He’s my home network tech support so if something breaks I call. Other than that we spend every night together from 5:30 or 6 until midnight when we go to sleep.
When he travels for business he calls 2-3 times a day and some of those might be during business hours. If I’m not in a meeting I take those.
I only call my husband at work for emergencies. We are both on IM all day, though, and each of us will leave a few lines for the other several times a day.
I IM with my wife constantly all day, every day, unless one of us is away from our desk or otherwise swamped. If I didn’t waste time chatting with her, I’d find another way to do so.
If I am going in to the office, he asks me to call him when I get there (before I get in the building) and I’ll call him when I’m leaving. Otherwise, we don’t talk during the workday unless it’s something very important. When he’s working, I won’t call him at ALL - he calls me when he’s leaving. Unless it’s an absolute emergency.
Never just to talk. But we will share mundane stuff through email. What do you want for dinner stuff. We both work for County Government (different departments) so sometimes we have business.
I rarely call my husband at work (same for him). Generally, when we do so, it’s in reference to some work question or to get some information needed for whatever reason (to fill out forms or get reimbursed for expenses or whatever). I do email him pretty frequently, but only with stuff that isn’t time critical or stuff that I find funny - that way, he can respond when/if it’s convenient for him.
I’m not a “you’re there to work, so work dammit!” person, but I don’t feel the need to be in contact with SpouseO much during the day, either. I’ll see him when I get home.
I was thinking a little more about this and I think the reason our work hours communications are fairly light is that we have twice worked for the same company. We had to be pretty disciplined during those years to not let our personal lives spill over into company time.
Unless it’s an emergency, no phone calls. I will send him emails on non-urgent stuff (hey, here’s a cheap airfare here or let’s take this stained glass class). Every once in a while we will send a text letting the other one know that we’ll be home later than expected. And maybe once a month or so a text at work that’s on the XOXO side or a picture of the dogs doing something funny. Anything outside of that is kinda rare.
I frankly don’t have enough conversation material to be on the phone at work on top of talking about things at home too. The whole idea sounds exhausting.
It has varied over the years depending on what each of us was doing for work at the time, but email/IM has been a normal part of interaction with my spouse throughout the day. Phone calls are once a day or less, generally.
We rarely text. We occasionally email each other, but because both of our companies read our emails, we don’t do it often.
We talk as much as we need to, and it varies from day to day. When I’m at work, I’m mindful of how much time I’m spending because I work in a cubicle and it’s unprofessional to talk about personal things in front of everyone. But if there’s something that needs to be talked about, we talk about it. I also get all my work done, without fail, during my regular work schedule.
There have been times when we’ve talked for hours when he’s at work. My granny just died and he’s been handling a lot of stuff for my Mom, so we’re talking more lately. This is technically on “work” time, but it’s balanced out by the umpteen hours he spends meeting with clients on the weekends and after hours, which is technically “my” time. It all comes out in the wash.
There’s this one client site I’ve gone to occasionally (like 5 times over the past 10 years) and I get stationed at a little computer on the edge of their cube farm. There’s this one dude who EVERY TIME I have been there spends a good portion of his day on the phone talking to/yelling at his kids or wife. It is indeed the weirdest thing.
I thought maybe the first time it was a fluke - a bad time in his life or something. But like a year later I went back and he did it again! And then again!
I haven’t been there in ages. I wonder if the guys around him got him to stop or if he got fired or what. I hope I wasn’t the only one who was appalled at having to listen to a guy yell at his family all day!
Mr. Ipsum and I both have Windows Live Messenger running on our work computers, and we leave them signed in all day. We don’t have long running discussions, but use it to send quick messages:
“Don’t forget to request a vacation day for that event next week.”
“I’m going to be late coming home because I have to pick up some milk.”
Etc. And sometimes we have some minor chitchat about how our day is going. But we rarely speak by phone while at work - that would be distracting to both our co-workers, and IM is just more convenient for quick things.
A complicating factor is that not everyone spends a ton of time with their spouse/SO after work. I’ve got a lot on my plate, and it’s not uncommon for me not to get home until ten or eleven. Exchanging a few lines at work now and then goes a long ways towards keeping us connected.
I’ve never concerned myself with this. I’m sure my company technically screens all emails as well (I think it’s SOP for major companies and ISTR some announcement to that effect as well). But that doesn’t mean that someone is physically reading your email. That would be physically impossible. It’s hard enough for people to keep up with their own emails these days, let alone those of others. I imagine all it means practically is that there’s some sort of screening software which is programmed to recognize certain key terms that are of interest to the company, and if they are flagged then someone reads it. But I’m not worried that someone is reading some sort of banter that I might be exchanging with my spouse. And if worst come to worst and some anonymous guy out in tech backrooms reads some email of mine, not the end of the world either.
One time it was a concern was when I was exchanging personal emails with several people and one of them used a racial slur. That is a big issue, because that’s probably something which is flagged by corporate software, and one thing I don’t need is having my emails flagged for use of racial slurs. I immediately asked the guy to cease and desist from this, and I did not end up hearing about it from anyone at corporate.
It depends. If someone is working crazy hours and pretty much living at the office, then the usual boss-employee has been broken and a lot of rules get blurry. If it is a normal office job and you’re leaving 5.30-6.00 ish most days, then one or two short calls a day are all that’s appropriate (along the lines of: do you want me to pick up anything at the store?).
I text my SO back and forth all day long if we both have time. It used to be e-mail. We rarely call each other though, so it’s not disruptive to the other people. Neither of us “need” to do it, and on the days we can’t, we don’t have any problems. It’s just nice.