Summer is a Terrorist Plot

Ah…working from home. What could be better? I can roll out of bed, shuffle to the kitchen while still wearing my Winnie the Pooh PJs, fire up the laptop and scroll through emails allowing the heavenly scent of coffee to start my synapses firing. If I want to take a break to go outside and work in my flowerbeds or start a load of laundry, then I can do so. No boss peering over my shoulder making sure I’m staying on task. If I want to grade essays at 11 p.m. while sitting in my bed, then I can…oh, the visions of amazing efficiency and productivity.

WAKE UP, YOU FOOL!

Yeah, that’s the lure of the whole working-from-home fad. And yes, I admit, I fell for its snake oil promise of productive bliss many years ago when I was determined to find a way to keep working and stay at home with the babes. Thank heavens now it’s only something I must endure from June until mid-August. But after ten years of mind-numbing multitasking I have the nervous twitches, gray hairs and hair trigger temper that come with a decade of trying to compose a logical sentence to my boss via email while simultaneously yelling at one child to stop banging on the piano, and listening to another contemplate (and by “contemplate” I mean “sing a song about”) the best way to remove the peanut butter that she accidentally smeared all over the front of the stove.

“Mom!!! Look at my drawing!”

            “That’s great…hey, where did you get the paper you used for that drawing…looks like my course syllabus…”

“Mom!!!! I’m REALLY hungry! Is it time for lunch yet??”

            “It’s 9:30 in the morning and you just ate breakfast ten minutes ago…”

“Mom!!!! I think the cat just coughed up a hairball on the chair!!”

“Awesome…Was it the brown chair that’s the same color as the cat or the green chair? If it’s the brown one I’ll get it later…”

            “Stop spinning the chair…please stop whistling in my ear…those are really great songs but do you think you could both pick ONE song and sing it at the same time?...no, don’t put fairy wings on the cat…”

I used to consider myself a serious badass in the work place. Ah, the days of having my own office, teaching three or four college courses while also managing a dozen or so adjunct staff, scheduling courses, heading up three different departments…what happened to her? That person wouldn’t take twenty minutes to compose a four-line email or worse, send an email and forget to include the important attachment.

Whoever invented summer vacation for school children was an evil, sadistic human being. Forget nuclear weapons and bio-terrorism. Summer vacation was Al-Queda’s attempt to collapse the economy by bringing the American workforce to its knees for three months out of the year. I wonder if that has anything to do with the price of gas…