Does anyone else have this? I WFH two or three days a week, have done for years, have a home office. I feel like whenever I interact with men (and sorry but it is usually men) in the course of my working day they treat my job as if it's a joke and something I can just drop at any minute. Little things, but these three things happened to me yesterday and I'm 90% sure they wouldn't have happened to a bloke.
Having work done on my house: I had a plasterer round to do a job. When I spoke to him last week to arrange it I said Monday is good but please can you try not to arrive between 10 and 11.30am as I'm on a work call which I can't step away from. All good, he says, he'll be here by 9.30am latest. He tips up at 10.30am and knocks on the doorbell. I'm leading a call with about 15 people and have to get up to let him in which is embarrassing and awkward for my junior team.
I'm irritated but I get that you can't always control the arrival time in heavy traffic so I don't get pissed off with him, but he doesn't apologise for the timing and starts yammering on to me in excruciating detail about what he's going to do when we've already had this conversation. I then make my excuses and say if you're going out to your van can you leave the door on the latch because I can't get away again. 15 minutes later he does exactly the same thing, rings the doorbell, drags me off the same call and then drags me down into the kitchen to talk about what he's going to do.
A bit later my ex husband calls to speak to my DD (he's overseas at the moment) and insists on putting me on the phone to his mother (who I still get on well with) for a chinwag. I tell him I'll call back after I've finished work. "But you work from home," he says. "You can talk to my mum for a minute." I say no, call after work hours. He calls back half an hour later (11.30ish) and puts his mum straight on to me without checking if I'm free. It's embarrassing telling an elderly woman who I hardly see that I don't have time to talk to her so I have to spend 10 minute chewing the fat when I'm frantically busy.
Later still the dad of a friend of my DD calls me to say he's going to be late back from work and can the friend come back to mine for an hour after school. I say ordinarily it would be fine but today it's not ideal because by then DD will be out and I'm working. "It's fine, she can just watch TV," he says, before I put my foot down.
Despite the fact that hybrid working is the norm for many people, I feel like a lot of people (mainly blokes although some women do it too) feel it's a nice cushty one for women which they can do to earn pin money while they look after their kids and think they have an absolute entitlement to butt into it as they see fit.
No one would dream of doing that to someone working in a City office. It's a job. It doesn't matter whether you're in the suburbs or in a gleaming building in the centre of town, you still should have the right not to be endlessly disturbed by other people just to make their lives slightly easier. It's just another example of men thinking they have the right to interrupt woman and take as much of their time as they need, isn't it?