Okay, this is plain silly.
I am on furlough this week. It’s the f-word in the workplace these days – a week away from work, without pay.
Newspapers and other companies have chosen this during the recession as a way to cut costs while avoiding more staff layoffs. I’m all for it. We’ve had to lose too many good people as it is.
But it’s proving to be an eye-opener for me. I’ve never considered myself a workaholic … and I don’t think I am. I enjoy my weekends, like to do stuff in the evenings, am hardly the early-riser-so-I-can-get-in-the-office-early kind of guy. So I’m no workaholic.
What I am, though – and this is a very painful conclusion – is an office-information addict. Ugh. Worse, it’s apparent that I don’t trust my staff enough to do what needs to be done while I’m not there. Double ugh. The latter is entirely irrational, given their capabilities.
Before I continue, I want to stress to my friends who are still seeking work after being laid off that my problem is a very nice problem to have. I still have a job. (At least, I expect to when I get back to the office next Monday.)
But here’s the deal: By law, when you’re on furlough, you’re technically laid off by the company. So, I’ve been laid off. Yes, there’s the promise of my job come Monday. But the fact that I’ve been laid off is sobering on its own.
Second, because the company can’t have it both ways – lay you off and not pay you for a week, yet expect you to keep on working from home or wherever – you can not have any contact with the workplace. No email, no voicemail, no phone calls, absolutely none. Don’t even try to visit your office.
And that’s the rub. Especially with the advent of voicemail and, later, the Internet and laptop connections to the workplace, I have never – ever! – been out of touch with the office while physically being out of the office.
A weekend road trip? I’d check my email in the hotel Saturday night. Two weeks on the lake? I’d admire the scenery … even blog about nature’s beauty. But I’d also check my email and voicemail daily. While in Ireland, visiting Meghan, my laptop would hum in the late hours as I checked email back home.
Worse, I now have an iPhone, fully capable of checking not just my work email but all of my email accounts 24/7. Oh, how I use my iPhone! It’s often the last thing I look at before sleep.
There are those of you who relish this connectivity. I thought I did.
But now that I can’t have it, it’s sobering – literally. I’m in withdrawal. And, frankly, it disturbs me, because it demonstrates a huge loss of perspective on my part.
One part of me tells myself: “Well, guy, in the end you’re responsible to your boss for hitting your numbers. So you shouldn’t apologize for wanting to know how it’s going while you’re away.”
That’s the devil speaking, I think. Because the angel on my other shoulder is whispering: “Relax, let go. You’ve hired good people, they know what they’re doing. They own the numbers, too. In the end, you’re not as important as you’d like to think. So accept that, and spend more time looking outside of work for what’s beautiful, real, important.”
Yesterday, my first furlough day, I drove west to Manhattan, Kansas, to visit son Zach at Kansas State. I took the dogs, and he and I took them for a walk after lunch. We caught up on how he’s doing. I'm very proud of him and miss him.
I then headed further west to visit the U.S. Cavalry Museum at Fort Riley, traversing the Flint Hills to get there.
And they were gorgeous – vast rolling plains of rust-colored brown, with lines of trees of burnt orange, red and yellow. The tree lines were like seams in a vast blanket.
I worked so very, very hard to soak up that beauty – to fill my heart and mind with it, in hopes of shoving aside any thoughts of the office.
It’s telling that I couldn’t do it. Not completely. Not yet. But I'm working on it.
“My name is Doug. I’m an office-information addict.”
“Hi, Doug!”
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