I have no experience with the glass ceiling of pay grades or fighting to climb the corporate ladder as a woman. I’m not denying they exist, I’m sure they do somewhere for some women. However, my plight with Motherhood in the Workplace has caused me a different angst in the past several weeks: Boredom.
Before leaving to have Miss M I was working a full 40-hour week and was given responsibility to make clients and candidates happy with their experience. I utilized process and made things move smoothly. I kept a pretty quick pace and loved it. There were spreadsheets running amok. Glory.
Last night I spent 4.5 hours calling people in our database trying to get them to apply to a position. I said the exact same thing no less than 80 times. It was excruciating.
Now, don’t get me wrong – the reason I first came to this job was because it was mindless and I could leave it at the door. I could pick up and take off as needed and the lack of responsibility was refreshing. But after that novelty wore off, I found it’s not really my nature to robotically work and leave a task less than cleaned up when I finish. I need clean databases. I need process and procedure. I need to see improvement. I want to be part of the solution.
So, when we made the decision to replace our sitter with yours truly and I switched to a 2-evening and a Tuesday work schedule, gone was my opportunity to participate in the type of work that I enjoyed. You simply can’t be client-facing when you leave on a Wednesday at 8:30pm not to return until the following Monday. Managers generally like a call back before that. At least, the good ones do.
So it leaves me in a pickle of choice. I get to enjoy my time at home with the kiddos and endure 18 endless hours of boredom while at work, or I get to seek out a new sitter and miss my glorious mornings of coffee and play and jammies until 10 but exchange it for pants with a zipper and packing my lunch and checking my voicemail. I have not yet found a solution that would allow me to bake a beautiful cake and get to eat it, too.