Older relatives not understanding WFH...

[TickingAlongNicely]

I am self employed. I work from home. It can only be done at home, unless I lug massive bits of equipment away with me (I can't work from a hotel room for example).

My children are Secondary school age. They don't need looking after, just someone around really in school holidays.

Every school holiday from my parents...
What are you doing? (I'm working)
What are the children (homework, chilling, hanging out, resting. )
Why don't you come and stay for a few days (I'm WORKING)
What do you do all day at home (WORK)
Don't you want to spend time with the children (I do in the afternoon/evenings, I start work early...).

I'm pretty sure if I worked in an office I wouldn't get this barrage of questions!

DM would do the same. I worked in an upstairs room at home, she would just come in and start shouting my name. I'm not even sure why she did that, the door was always unlocked so she knew I was in.🙇

Anyway, the shouting was the annoyance. Sat on a call and I hear the door slam and the shouting immediately.

Worst part is I would say I have a call at 10am. Every day. After a few days she'd just do it again.

I’ve had from my mum ‘oh but you don’t really work when you’re WFH, do you?’ And from MIL to her friend when she asked what I do, ‘she’s just does a bit of typing’ I don’t think she could grasp that a woman could have a proper job 🙄

My DF ( who would be 100 if he was still with us) was an absolute pioneer of "wfh" aka watching the cricket from his makeshift desk in front of the TV. But there wasn't all the teams meetings etc back then.

I WFH was born in a country where WFH is not really a thing. When I had my youngest, I visited my home country in the summer holidays to stay with my parents. They were totally oblivious to the fact that I had to work and they offered no help (Btw it is very much expected in my culture for the grandparents to help). They told me off many times to 'get a real job' and made crazy comments like 'you don't have a job', 'you won't have pension', 'you have to ask your husband for money', etc. They also went to other relatives and told them all these and then these relatives made some weird comments to me at the family gatherings, like 'we have to go here and there, ask your DH from some money from his account', and I was like, WTF??? Finally, I told my mother (who in spite of having 3+ weeks of leave available never took any leave from work to help with grandkids when I visited) that I will drop off my kids at her office for her to see how difficult it is for me to cope every day as I really have to work!

To be fair on the latter, I DO flex my WFH time for lots of things, but unstructured socialising isn't one of them.

For example, if MIL wanted to meet for strictly one hour for lunch, yes, I could do that.

But I can't have someone dropping in for "chat" which lasts 15m to 90m, at a random time of the day.

Your dad sounds fantastic!

My parents have never understood my career - 15 years in a senior media position then a career change to a different, albeit, extremely well established sector. My DM lived with us for a while after DF died she when I wfh in the dining room she would come and sit opposite me and just watch, smiling serenely. Every so often, “what are you doing now”. “Shall we have a coffee?” 😬.
They basically only understood/respected about 5 professions - law, medicine , teaching, banking and trades. Anything else ie what most people do, was a mystery 😂

The minute I start work my phone is put in work mode-DH, DC can get through, no one else

Don't get calls or texts from others until I switch it back
No exceptions

So if she calls/texts to ask what you are doing you don't see it let alone reply
I doubt she will change so you change
Reply with " working" if she asks about holidays
No other long explanations
Just working ...

I too work from home 4 days and in the office one. My gran fully believes I’m living my best life. She’ll say can you come and take me here etc I’ll say no I’m working. She will say things like but you’re at home so you’re not really working and I bet you rest up watching tv all day 🤦‍♀️

So yes elderly people just cannot understand at all.

Also, I don’t think it’s the age as such. It’s the computer experience/type of work they have done. Someone who’s done manual type jobs all their life, can’t fathom that a job could all be done on a screen. That person could be in their 40s and still think I’m “skiving”. Whereas someone could be in their 80s and get it as per post above. I suspect that the crux of it with my mum is that she can’t fathom what I actually do. So I must be doing nothing 🤣

Yes to all of this. Every single post here sums up my life.MiL lives down the road and she’ll often pop in just for a chat and a cup of tea at all times of the day, not grasping the concept of working from home. Tbh, in her case I think the problem is BiL who is one of those WFH-shirker types; he’s always out and about, when he’s supposed to be working, playing football in the middle of the afternoon and says it’s all fine as he doesn’t have very much to do at work anyway. In contrast, I tend to be either in back-to-back teams meetings, or head down writing reports and meeting deadlines. DH has a job which can’t be done remotely so when you put that together I can sort of understand why she would initially think that my two non-office days each week (I’m hybrid) are effectively days off. What I can’t understand though is why she continues to believe this, even after I’ve told her over and over again – and the evidence is clearly there to be seen when she interrupts meetings every week.

Then there’s my own parents who live abroad so I don’t get the popping round situation but mum does try to call in the middle of my WFH days because she thinks I’ll be bored at home on my own and wants to cheer me up. She’ll also do that thing a PP mentioned where she’ll call with something I need to do urgently and it has to be me because my sister is working. Yes, DSis works outside the home but in a part time job 4 mornings per week – she has much more time than me to help with mum’s errands but the non-understanding, or at least their understanding of WFH is so ingrained. My parents visit twice a year and tend to stay for 2-3 weeks. Obviously I take some time off to spend with them while they are around but I can’t take off the whole time so often they are in the house while I’m trying to work. They’ll invite people round for coffee, lunch etc and then mum will bang on my office door and interrupt meetings to tell me how rude I’m being, shut up in my room rather than being sociable with guests. I’ve gone over the situation so many times but she still doesn’t get it.Dad, on the other hand, has always been obsessed with the idea of “getting one over on the man” and is constantly asking questions about how do they actually know I’m working and how much can I get away with. He just won’t accept that despite there mot being anyone actually checking up on me, it would become very apparent very soon that work isn’t getting done or that I’m not in meetings. Mind you, dad also thinks that my job is making coffee for a big important male boss, so he doesn’t really understand how that can be done from home anyway. Then, when DH gets home from work, my parents will fawn over him saying “the worker is home” and going on about how lucky I am to have a husband that goes out to earn a crust while I do my little job from home for “pin money”. I earn nearly 3 x DH’s salary but it’s not about that – it’s about respecting WFH as a normal working day. I just don’t understand the repeated resistance to it and inability to understand that they just need to behave in the same way as if I were actually in the office.

I used to wfh once per fortnight before covid and just didn’t tell anyone. When parents visited, I would just go into the office full-time.Now that covid has brought it all into the open, there’s no hiding the fact that I work hybrid and we have reduced to 60% desk space so there’s no option to go in on a scheduled WFH day as there’s no space for me.

I know I am probably going to get slated- but in my experience something happens to many people once retired for a few years.. they seem to completely lose the understanding of what working life / life with lots of kids and being busy is. Even if they have had a really busy job or family in their past.
Their lives have slowed to a crawl (and a busy day is needing to go to the PO to post a parcel or similar) and they just can’t understand why you can’t drop everything for a phone call/ visit or why you haven’t responded to a text or email within the hour.
WFH is even worse as they just assume you are dossing at home.
I’ve had it many times with multiple retired persons. So I don’t think you are alone OP

He was iconic and sadly no longer with me.
He randomly got introduced to Calum Best once who was very polite and my dad pipes up…
I had a night out with your old man once, one of the best nights of my life until I got home to the Mrs!
They then sat and had lunch, and my dad retold the evening with his hero, Georgie Best.
He kept in touch and my dad was always telling anyone he met ‘oh my new mate Calum has been talking to me on the Tweet!’
When he was really poorly and in hospice care he told all the nurses, who thought it was the drugs talking. And it really wasn’t.
By this point he was an expert in beauty (field I worked in) and was always giving hints on how to get rid of fake tan streaks.
I can remember once leaving him with a group of women who all owned different small beauty brands and honestly he was in heaven.
Took him into our John Lewis once and I was buying a lipstick and he said to the assistant….
‘She won’t ask, love, but I will. If she puts that lippie on her blog, can I have a few samples?’ More goodies.
Best friend I ever had. He even chose the pics for his funeral leaflet, and told me to Hollywood filter them so he could approve them.
Best mate I ever had.

An hour long phone call every evening is a lot. She sounds very high maintenance and all the responsibility for her happiness seems to be on you, rather than your dad and your brother who actually live in the same house as her.

Do you enjoy the daily phone call or are you doing this out of a sense of duty? An hour long phone call once a week sounds much more reasonable.

I completely agree with this. My DP (age 50) has just taken the last year off work (sold his own business, needed a break, took it with what he made) and it was scary how quickly he turned into a 'retired person' where going food shopping was the major part of his day. He's going to get a major shock when he goes back to work.

I don't have this problem with family as I don't live near any of them, but if any of them came knocking while I was WFH I just wouldn't answer the door.

Yeah and same for me but I can understand why it is difficult to understand for older people

I think my parents are me nipping out sometimes for school events, I have a regular exercise class that I use my lunch break for once a week etc and think how can she not have time to pick up the phone?

And the answer is of course that I can plan my week around specific commitments but am not able to drop everything at any time but if you haven't worked like that, it's hard to understand

Most retired people are busier than I am
Someone pushing boundaries and repeatedly questioning in this way is toxic not elderly.

Luckily my parents are pretty clued up. Both my sister and I did WFH days from their house when our kids were little so mum could look after them, so my parents are aware that WFH is work and not a day off.

You beat me to it!! I am in my 70's and retired now but I used to WFH for part of my job in the NHS because I had a better computer and internet connection. My job was mixed, managing teamsover several small bases and producing papers and protocols in my area of expertise. Its not age,its cluelessness!!

Well, neither my parents nor PILs have the remotest understanding of what I do for a living, and I’ve been an academic for the best part of 30 years

Mine neither. I have been self-employed for about 20 years and have always worked from home, first it was mostly internet content writing, blogging, SEO type stuff, over the years I have moved into other fields and have turned a hobby into a job.

My mum understands what an doing now better, but the SEO/internet stuff was totally over her head. Because of the nature of the work it did mean I could be really flexible and arrange working around school runs or sports days or whatever and I didn;t have the same volume of work every week. But that didn't mean that I didn't have any responsibilities and the work still had to get done!

Working from home isn't the same as proper work. So I'm with your relatives.

My elderly mother regularly phones or texts (or both) throughout the day when I'm working. I could go in to the office but we no longer have phones on our desks and it's all open plan anyway so people overhear our phone calls to a much larger extent than they used to.
Anyway, the crux of this is that she will do this to me, while I'm at work, but my siblings (and their husbands) who by and large have reached retirement age, she wouldn't do this to, no idea why but she wouldn't. Just likes to communicate with the one person who is still holding down a full time job.

I empathise greatly with all of you who have relatives who do this...and who are STILL doing it years after the pandemic. It might have been possible (though not necessarily within the rules) during the pandemic but it's definitely not possible now.

What do you mean 🤣

and once again that is such an ageist comment.

I don't think this is an issue of older people not understanding WFH, but your parents being a bit dim. Why do they keep asking the same questions when you have already explained?