Bright and early Friday

SaintPaulGal

A major YIKES at everyone dealing with unruly kids at the office!  I absolutely cannot imagine being in that situation.  My coworkers will sometimes bring kids in for a visit (and by "sometimes" I mean maybe once or twice a year at most), but that is typically at the very end of the day and for 5-10 minutes max.  I would go completely batty if there were kids running around in the office.

charlotte989875

thefanciestbeckler said:

Small rant.

Why do people in my office feel like it's ok to bring their kids/grandkids to work when they're on fall break? We currently have 3 kids running the halls playing youtube videos and singing at the top of their lungs. It is making it so hard to concentrate. Boss man is out sick today so there is nobody here (with any authority) to say anything.

This drives me bananas. We have flexible schedules. The only time people have to be in the office is when they are teaching/have meetings. At my old university when their kids were out of school one guy would bring his kids. But they were old enough to get bored, so they would wander down the hall and into people's offices and start chatting, or playing with things on desks. It was ridiculous. I played along for a few minutes then would be all "where's your Dad??"

Heffalump

Look, I get that childcare is expensive.  (Back when both of my kids were full time and we were in the old house, we were actually paying more in daycare than on our mortgage every month.)  But when you have kids, part of your job is figuring all that out, because hauling them into work should not be the default option.

I can count on two fingers the number of times I've brought Wooz into work.  Once was when the power went out at DC and they had to close; I was 20 minutes away and DH was >1 hour, so I picked her up until DH could get to my office and take her home.  (I had a meeting I couldn't cancel that afternoon, and DH's schedule was open.)  That office was open floorplan, so until he arrived, I parked both of us in an empty conference room and I worked from my laptop while she colored.  The other time, she had camp Uptown and DH's office had some major crisis, so he asked if I could get her from camp that day.  I had a few things to finish up, so I picked her up, put her in my visitor chair with some paper and pens and a bag of vending machine M&Ms, and she drew while I wrapped things up.

Under no circumstances did she interact with my coworkers.  She's a good kid, they're nice people, but they were working, and there was no reason for my weird glitch to turn into an office disruption.  And I would never let her roam unsupervised.  NO WAY.