flop

Fifteen days in.

I have been at this job, working daily from around 9 to around 5, for 3 work weeks, 120 hours - one pay check. 20 more hours in the car.

I have had coherent, useful, productive, inquisitive thoughts for about... maybe 60 of them.

I'm getting there.

On Wednesday, I left my notebook at home. The notebook filled with day-to-day stream of consciousness, stream-of-day - questions about projects, products, programs - notes for the exam I will have to take and pass within 90 days into the job. The notebook I cling to to make sense of today out of whatever I wrote yesterday.

All those years working from home has spoiled me. I would be on conference calls barefoot, after my morning nap, often in whatever I had worked out in that had pushed me out of bed earlier, at 6. There was no 'forgetting things.' There was laundry when my mind wandered, and my notebook was likely by the bed if not by my computer. I could walk upstairs to get it. Work through my to-do's while reclining on the Tempurpedic.

We're in-town snobs. We don't commute. We live "ITP" as we say around here - inside-the-perimeter, Atlanta proper, planned neighborhood, but not the 'burbs. Fulton County, Fulton County taxes. So I got a job in the suburbs. Way in the suburbs. Far far away in Farfarawayland. I am not used to the commute.

I took about three minutes to breathe in my cube, to weigh having that notebook against returning into that traffic. Maybe two minutes. I checked my calendar. I realized, for the kazillionth time that week that I have only the thinnest grasp on what I am doing. That notebook is my lifeline.

I slipped out.

No longer "opposite traffic," the drive home and back had me settled into work around 11.

The next day, Thursday, while going over the inventory of My Things before while leaving my neighborhood, I realized my phone was still at home. On the bathroom counter.

I returned. Frustrated, because I was missing the early-traffic window, but proud that I figured it out early. I zipped home, parked, ran inside, turned off the alarm, kicked off my shoes, bolted up the stairs, grabbed my phone, re-set the house alarm, jumped back in the car, and patted myself on the back when I realized I was in the exact same spot as when I had noticed the missing phone a scant 6 minutes earlier. Nice.

I arrived at work 55 minutes later. Not quite an hour. Still better than Wednesday. I had originally planned to be early, and I was still solidly on time.

Barefoot.

No shoes at all.

The shoes I had kicked off were, presumably, in the kitchen.

I moved the trumpet I have not yet returned to the music store (new rental contract elsewhere) and looked for the shoes. (Perhaps I had put them UNDER the trumpet case...) I looked under seats, in the back, opened the trunk (Perhaps I had put them IN the trunk...) No shoes.

Sebastian's flip flops - though he has been told a thousand times not to leave them in my car - were there. In the back seat.

I put them on.

Three weeks into my new banking job, and I wore my ten-year-old-son's flippy floppies all day.

With my silk blouse with beading detail, my ponte knit skirt with wide grosgrain trim. The patent leather belt, the long drapey sweater.

And the flip flops.

Today, I'm working from home. Barefoot.

Home. Work.

This is where I work:  at the kitchen table, partially cleared.  On my bed, not yet made.  On the couch, recently re-slip covered (and still not replaced).  In my office, piles pushed aside.  In the TV room, late.

Work spills into work spills into life and all the edges get blurred.  I have been known to shout at children, "I just need ten minutes if you give me quiet!  Hours if you don't!"  And I bill that way. Conscientiously tracking my time, remembering when I mentally or physically checked out and subtracting those hours from my day, making them up at night, or the next day (the "off" day.)

In four years contracting for the same desperate multi-national, I have watched people more competent, more necessary, more confident, more reliable... get laid off.  Get end dates, or not. Get escorted out, or told when it will end.  It is frightening to be this dependent upon something so clearly so shaky.  And it is this, my low-commitment, flexible, no-benefits, frenetic lifestyle that saves me.

Deadlines loom, and stuff on stuff on other bits of stuff is due - or should be done.  And some of it is not particularly trackable or traceable - some of it is mine and only mine within this company that spans countries, this job that spans departments.  Working with clumsy web content tools and internal clients spread across aforementioned lands and duties.  Working some, too, with words - amorphous and gooey and always positive.

So the home work breeds homework. The 'to do' list that only sometimes gets items ticked off.

Mostly not.  And I have survivor's guilt, and 3 AM panic.  And hours that spill over my allotted 24/week, and other hours that I know I shouldn't add on, and do - to my day, but not to my time sheet.  

And in the spaces in-between, in the summertime, pools are visited, and bathing suits eventually put away.  Groceries are purchased, and children are eventually fed , dirt is tracked (good outdoors brought in)  and the floor is eventually vacuumed. On camp days, bags are packed. Walks are sometimes (but not enough) taken and some evenings, we go to the park.  We eat out a few times too many.

And school will start, and their homework will begin again.  And mine that comes from theirs- papers to be signed and registrations to be completed and checks to be written and field trips to man.  And I will miss some of it - not show up, forget to send the check, not sign the slip.  And I will feel myself slipping.  And I will question my own competency.  

But in This job, I cannot get fired.  My littles, at least, won't let me go - and when they do, I will still show up for work. Trying to win them back, wanting to be needed.