Or you are on break - and if you are going to do this - even as a salaried employee - create a clear line - leave your desk, wander to the cafeteria or break room, make your call, get back. Unless you are fortunate enough to have a door.
The thing about most cube environments is that personal phone calls are the among least discrete “not work” activities a person does. It doesn’t take too many “chatting” conversations before you gain the reputation of someone who spends their work hours chatting on the phone. Text and email and chat - way more discrete.
We call for “I have to work late” “The school nurse called, I’m getting the kids” “Can you get the kids” and I do call after 5:30 for “are you going to be home for dinner or should we eat without you.” It doesn’t have to be a huge emergency, but it should be quick and you shouldn’t need to do this constantly.
A couple texts or emails throughout the day are fine (I’ve certainly been guilty of “Oh man guess what my boss just said?” type texts. A brief phone call along the line of “The house is on fire” or “The kids are sick” or “Will you be home for dinner, how do you feel about chicken tonight?” are also fine.
Kicking back and calling just to chat? It ruins productivity and it’s a distracting. If you can’t go for a day (yes, even if it’s a full 24 hours) without chatting with your little snookums, you need therapy.
…or maybe they’re just trying to stay connected to their spouse. My husband works long hours (7am-6pm weekdays), plus occasional nights and weekends, plus he has an active social life outside of work (tennis, golf, shooting). I have a less hectic, but similar schedule, so at times during work is the only time we have to “chat.” We’re both successful business people, and we’ve been happily married for almost 25 years now. It works for us, no therapy required.
My husband and I are rarely at work at the same time, one of us is usually home. The working person dictates how much IMing happens:. He has a job where he is lucky enough to have work to do so we communicate less. At my job I’m just a warm body until I’m needed for an emergency so basically we IM the whole time I’m there.
That is, it used to be that way. Now that the at-home person has a baby to care for the communication is somewhat less frequent and more to convey information than chat.
I keep a constant email train every day with my husband while we’re both in the office. If he’s out, we’ll text occasionally. I also keep another email train going with a friend who is at home online in another country.
With both, the subject line is whatever the name of that day is.
Not everyone has a job that requires them to be a busy busy bee.
Jobs I’ve had where messaging does not disrupt productivity: admin at a three person software development company, off season desk clerk at a wildly unpopular motel, consultant whose deliverables are finished and waiting for revisions, college teacher with too many office hours.
I’m not sure what productive activities you’d have me do as a desk clerk who would see 1-2 customers per 24 hour shift.
Because my husband works in the financial industry, ALL of his emails are, indeed, both scanned for key words by a software program AND read by the office manager.
For instance, it is illegal for a broker to promise a guaranteed return to clients except for investments such as cd’s. So the words “promise” and “guaranteed return” will trigger a compliance investigation. Other words are “deceived” and “sue.” The office manager’s job is to scan emails and make sure that brokers aren’t doing something illegal or unethical, such as churning accounts or discussing a client’s portfolio with someone else (e.g. an elderly client’s children) – something that could later cost the firm $$. If after an initial screening of the email, they cannot determine that what is being said between the two parties is an innocuous thing, the broker has to fill out a 4-page compliance report explaining it.
Just last month, I emailed my husband with a request to forward me their medical expense claim form. His office manager forwarded it to him before he’d even read my email. He asked her to stop doing that because it was creeping him out.
So, yes, they DO read all his emails. We can thank all the crooks in the financial industry for this intrusion.
The only time I call or email my husband frequently is when I’m home organizing stuff (mail, papers, deeds, contracts, projects) and planning stuff. Then I might call or e-mail him several times a day with questions or proposals.
I figure that really can’t wait till he’s home. If we’re home, we’re busy doing chores, the toddler is distracting, or either one of is is too tired.
We hardly ever e-mail,contact or text lovingly or just to say hi. It’s usually just: “hey, I could pick up our kid if you like instead of you, and do you want anything from the store?”
Sometimes he will e-mail me a link of something he found interesting. I don’t reply to those.
And it has happened once or twice that I send him an e-mail explaining and making up if we had a row before we left for work. No calls in that case though.
My co-worker I share a room with is the same way, even more businesslike. She will however pick up the phone whenever one of her three teenage daughters calls her. Or she will call them and ask how something went. She does that about once every day/two days, on average, and only a couple minutes per call.
Nobody “has to” talk to their spouse/SO multiple times a day. Me, I don’t have to have a coke with my lunch. I don’t have to listen to sports-related podcasts while I drive to work. I don’t have to listen to music while at my desk. I don’t have to check baseball scores first thing every morning.
But I do all of these things, most days if not all. I do them because I want to, and there’s no good reason to not.
Similarly, if I want to talk to my wife for some reason during the day - whether for administrative purposes or just because - I will. My employer doesn’t care even a tiny bit; like most halfway decent companies, they recognized a long time ago that people are more useful and productive when their existence as actual humans is recognized and even encouraged. My co-workers don’t care, because I’m in an office.
I don’t have to, but I do, because I want to. Why is that baffling?
It seems like the people in this thread who don’t speak to their spouses during the workday want to believe that there’s something inherently wrong with the people who do. Stop that; it’s silly.
On the topic of employers allowing this - I don’t think my boss knows I have an IM window open all day for occasionally chatting with my husband. But, I don’t think she’d care. On one occasion, when she was showing me something on a webpage, an IM from her daughter popped up on her computer. Another time, I stopped by her office to ask a question and she said, “Sure, just a second, I’m sending a text message.” And since we don’t have business-supplied phones, she was using her own phone for that. So I don’t feel bad at all about occasional chitchat with my husband during slow periods.
I do call my husband at work and from work. The conversations are usually 30 seconds or less. It’s usually me asking a question and getting the answer. Easy peasy.
I try to do this via email but sometimes it is time sensitive (picking up the kids being one example) and he doesn’t get back to me fast enough.
The only ‘chitchatting’ we do is via email or IM and that’s usually to pass along interesting information.
My company could give a rat’s ass. Everyone has their family on their IM and get’s personal emails. Heck, I hang out with some of my co-workers family members without them.
You seem to be getting defensive, and no one said any such thing, in fact. It is not an attack, or an insult, to say you find something baffling. When partners are in contact, 4-5+ times a days, every day, it’s easy for people, who don’t understand it themselves, to read that as some sort of ‘need’. No not like crack, but an emotional need, being manifest. I’m not saying that’s right, just that it’s not so surprising a view, for those who don’t understand the desire.
When you jump to a defensive stance, imagining an attack where none is intended, that also could read as reinforcing the inkling that there’s an emotional element at play.
Sure, it’s an emotional need being manifest. I could say “People who never want to seem to talk to their SOs are weird. They must not really love them.”
As I said in my original post: “People are all very different.” My SO and I have the opportunity to talk often, no one cares (they talk even more than I do!), so we do.
That doesn’t mean if I couldn’t, I’d shrivel up and die or something.
I don’t like to be bothered with a personal phone call (from anyone, whether it’s my husband, my parents, my grandmother, or whoever) at work very often. My husband calls me probably once or twice a week, but tries to do it when I’m on lunch break. I call him maybe once a week, if that. When we do call each other it’s always to ask a specific question and the conversation is never long. Sometimes we email back and forth quite a bit, and occasionally text. Other times we can go days without emailing one another. Most of the time we’re both just too busy and I don’t know what we’d sit and chat about. We save that for the dinner table.