To be fuming that DH has spent the whole day on his laptop?

[MamaOnTheCoast]

DH has spent the whole day on his laptop “working” in his home office and he hasn’t even seen me and the DC all day! He was up at 5am (the kids woke up at 6am) and he is still in his home office “working” now so we haven’t seen him all day! He even refused Christmas dinner as he said he was “too busy working”. DH does a senior office based job and he wasn’t meant to be working at all over Christmas but he is saying he apparently has to work today “because it’s urgent”! It’s Christmas Day and we haven’t seen him all day and DH can’t see the problem with this! The kids are really upset about it too! AIBU to be livid with DH over this? DH literally doesn’t see the problem but I’m fuming and the kids are upset too!

Unplug the computer.

I don’t know OP , Is he in some sort of trouble at work regarding finances or whatever ??, that’s warranting him working since 5 am this morning, still working at this hour , missing dinner & it’s Christmas Day, there’s something going on anyway.

Is he watching porn?

No one in an office I’ve ever met or in my experience of working in one, works on Xmas day. No one would reply to you.

Even people having affairs need to eat. I don’t think that explains why he would miss Christmas dinner. This seems more like a looming personal crisis - be that mental health-related, financial, legal, professional etc.

It doesn’t sound like the behaviour of men I know who have had affairs - they were much sneakier about it. It sounds much more like the sudden, erratic, out of character behaviour of a friend’s now ex-husband shortly before it was discovered that he’d racked up hundreds of thousands of pounds in gambling debt behind her back.

Please tell me you didn’t plate him up a dinner and deliver it to his office? Or did he deign to join you for lunch?

Such as?

Today and tomorrow are holidays and then it’s the weekend so nothing will be happening until Monday

OP, how far is this an aberration from his usual behaviour? There's your starting point, you know him better than we do. But no, this is neither usual nor acceptable behaviour, and I'd be digging. I'm sorry you're having to deal with this.

I would go absolutely ballistic. What on earth could be so important?

You have my sympathy.
Question : Did you supply him with drinks and snacks ???????????? I know what that's like, it's lonely. I suggest that you install some comfy seats in there and ALL join him as its The Holiday season...we wouldn't want him getting lonesome and start chatting to strangers online.

Just one example - data leaks or hacks.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/dec/25/anonymous-security-thinktank-stratfor

E.g. Christmas Day 2014 - hackers claimed to have stolen the personal details of thousands of clients of the US security think tank Stratfor. I’m sure their senior teams worked throughout Christmas trying to understand the scale of the leak, who had been impacted, trying to reassure clients etc.

(To be clear, I’m not saying this is the case for the OP’s DH, nor that if it were, it would excuse his erratic behaviour and his failure to provide any explanation. Just that it’s not out of the question that a disaster could occur that could lead to senior members of an organisation working through Christmas).

What does he do? I could sort of understand this if, say, your DH was a lawyer and needed to prepare life or death court proceedings. But I can't think of much else that is office=based that would be this urgent.

What is his job? If he has never worked weekends or late then its utter bollocks. But you know that, or you wouldn't be on here.

Another example - Christmas Day 2021, when Santander accidentally deposited £130 million into 75,000 customers’ accounts and then had to rush to try to claw back the money. I’m sure there were multiple disrupted Christmas dinners then too.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59826345

So if your electricity went down you wouldn't want people to fix it on Christmas day, right? If your bank transactions didn't work, or if your bank was being hacked, that's fine, it's not life or death, Christmas with family is more important, those office workers on call are all massive twats and arseholes.

He’s working? All day on Christmas Day? And herding you out the room when you try and speak to him? Something’s off imo. Is he in financial shit? Got an OW? Just trying (and succeeding) to avoid the chaos of family life? You need a serious word when he finally emerges!

Oh stop.

It takes literally a few seconds to text to say 'I'm really sorry, we've had a crisis. It's an emergency'. It takes less time than going to have a pee, which I'm sure he did more than once today.

duplicate

Cyber attack on a company or a company's client is really the only thing I can think of that could result in unexpectedly having to work Christmas day. Or I guess an office/factory catching fire? Or maybe something like a steel mill where if it cools down it's going to be unusable.

Obviously police officers and civilians and presumably a chunk of the armed forces and the NHS and railway engineers and I assume MI5 and GCHQ must have people working on Christmas Day, but they'll have been rotaed in or rotaed on call.

I have worked in the Big 4 and I have worked in the NHS in the pandemic and still didn't have to didn't have to do surprise work on Christmas Day. I have worked on Christmas Eve, I have worked on Boxing Day so I am no paragon of Christmas Sanctity but never Christmas Day itself.

He’s an office worker some sort of mediocre middle manager type most probably. Highly doubtful to be a job requiring 16 hr day on Christmas Day, if his work could be in those realms I’m sure OP would have said

I’m not defending OP’s husband’s erratic behaviour - which seems far more suggestive of a looming personal crisis than a work one - just pointing out that even with the markets closed, it’s possible for things to go wrong that require urgent handling on Christmas Day.

I think 'affair' is a bit of a hasty conclusion... if you were having an affair I think you'd want to come and play 'family man' at least for a bit to seem more convincing. And, as has been said, he'll still need to eat.

But it's weird for him to do this and not even stop to explain why. In that position, no matter how stressed you are you should at least take 30 seconds to say or message to your partner 'All our servers are down and we're going to lose millions if we don't get it going again' or 'Something's come up that's going to be in the news tomorrow and I have to do crisis management and I'm sorry but I don't know how long it will take'.

Not just 'I'm working, don't disturb me'

I agree it's especially mean to do this to foster kids who really need a 'normal' family Christmas.

OP this is ridiculous.
Your husband has an addiction to something or someone on the internet
This behaviour is totally unacceptable nobody would accept it so why do you?

It’s either a massive emergency or he has checked out of family life? Not eating lunch sounds like stress to me. I wonder if he’s done something massively wrong he is trying to fix?

He’s not working.