Working from home disasters

[Overmydeadbody456]

Working from home today. Childcare issues in that both grandparents (who usually share childcare on Fridays) are both poorly so have had to keep DS (3) at home with me today. Told manager who was fine with it

I had to make an important call to a client . Bribed DS to stay quiet for 2 mins. He put his finger over his mouth as if to do the shush sign, which made me think he understood. Dialled. As soon as the client answered, DS, sat right next to me, let out the loudest &longest high pitched scream.
I couldn’t apologise enough to the client, they didn’t sound impressed!

Anybody else had anything embarrassing or mortifying happen while working from home?

I've only ever had my (sick) child at home with me twice in years of wfh and they tend to watch lots of tv and nap when sick. I told my boss (and owner of the company) and he prefers I still work as much as is possible that take a day off. One of those days I had a client call and I emailed her in advance and offered to swap it to the following day but she wanted to go ahead. It's not unprofessional if it's rare and unusual and obviously depends on the nature of business and client/customer relationship.

My only bad experience was when walking the dogs during an ALL DAY con call. I went in a non relevant to me bit and thought I was on mute. I wasn't and shouted across the park to my dogs. I quickly went on mute and never owned up! Two people realised it was me because of the names of the dogs and I made a conscious effort never to mention my dogs' names at work again!

This is my favourite

m.youtube.com/watch?v=co_DNpTMKXk

if your childcare falls through, you take leave

It's this sort of 'one size fits all' attitude from managers that makes flexible working so difficult for everyone.

Most people I know, if childcare falls through, they speak to their manager and then do as much as they can on that day even if it means working when DC nap/watch tv and then carrying on after bedtime. Most people can catch up with a long day the next day and are often the ones fitting in a call when they are supposedly 'off', replying to some urgent emails at the weekend or starting early before the DC get up.

As long as the work gets done no one needs to 'clock in' - why not trust people to do what they need to do even they work outside of core hours?

Not working from home but my mum had a telephone interview this week where her dog in a bid to make her play ball jumped on her with zero warning. Luckily the interviewer saw the funny side of what came out of my mum's mouth

I WFH and at the moment I have no childcare (this is temporary). I have discovered that telling small children to be quiet because Mummy needs to make an important call is totally counterproductive. Now I tell then that I have a really massive stuck poo so I will be in the bathroom making a stink for the next 10 minutes. It works for me! Thankfully most of my work is online and I make maybe one call every 2 months. The rest of the time I just do the bare minimum and make up the lost time once the kids are in bed.

When I was pregnant with DC2 DH started his own business, and I did the admin stuff from home.

One particular day when DC2 was a few months old, I was at home but had diverted the work number to our home phone. My aunt was visiting and was walking past the phone as it rang. Before I had a chance to tell her it might be a business call and to answer with the company name, she picked up the receiver and said 'hello'. That was fine I suppose but what wasn't so fine was when she told the customer on the other end of the phone that ''fargo can't come to the phone right now as she's breastfeeding the baby''. Whatever happened to something like ''I'm sorry fargo isn't available right now. Can she return your call?!''

ALL DAY con call

What nightmare scenario is this? Who the hell can concentrate on a call for that long?

I think how much flexibility someone has around WFH and whether to work if childcare falls through massively depends on the role. For our team, we'd usually rather people did work, even if not at full capacity, but we're techies, not customer-facing. Most calls are with colleagues in other offices. For other roles, that wouldn't really work.

@EBearhug it was ridiculous. It was a quarterly briefing call for about 50 people we usually did face to face but the powers that be (not my current company, a big international) decided we weren't allowed to travel so it was on the phone.

We often get pressure to see if travel is really necessary, but for a long briefing, we would probably use the video conferencing rooms and break it up. Though currently, they do seem to recognise some face-to-face meeting is useful and will approve travel for it.

I don’t believe a full day conf call would be productive - it's harder to focus than face-to-face. It would be better to do separate sessions on all the different areas covered.