About halfway through an out-loud polysyllabic characterization of a dictator (physician dictating medical report, that is) a while ago, it occurred to me that the dictator may not in fact indulge in the activity to which that compound term specifically referred (think “suck-start a Harley,” you’ll get the drift), and that I was probably being unfair calling the guy a “blank-blanker,” despite the fact that he seemed to be talking with his mouth full and his teeth tightly clenched (ouch!).
One of the joys of working at home, in this particular profession, is that we never have to meet the people whose voices reverberate continuously in our heads, any given day. While generally I am neither surly nor dismissive enough to call some of these folks to their faces what I call them out loud, in the privacy of my own home office every day, after working at home for nearly 10 years, I’m not sure I could re-learn the necessary skill of keeping one’s mouth shut--discretion being the better part of valor--in a more public workplace again.
Flipside of that is, sometimes even antisocial “I” miss the social contact, the ability actually to ask a dictator what he thought he was saying, or even just say “good morning” to the guy without wanting to reach out and strangle the life out of him so that he can no longer fuck up my production (and paycheck) with his clenched-teeth, mouth-full, incoherent mumbles that I‘m sure he thinks make him sound cool and professional.
Sometimes I miss simple eye contact--and no, stare-downs with cats don’t count.
I was in my forties before I took a work-at-home job, and that was probably good. I’m not sure I could have handled it when I was younger, before I had amassed a solid quarter-century of working “out in the world,” with a variety of people, and had in fact worn my generally introverted self OUT working with said variety.
First thing I learned was that, even from a thousand miles away, our first instinct is to “connect” somehow with the people whose voices are relentlessly invading our heads. Even though we will never meet the owners of those voices, we want almost desperately to care about them and what they do, and by extension, the patients they care for every day of the world--when we care, we become better, more efficient, more productive. We become “value added,” we feel that, and it matters to us.
A long time ago one of the people I transcribed for in an RL environment--that is, we shared the same suite of offices at the same Kansas City address, actually breathed the same air, endured the same weather, took the same elevators, walked the same streets, etc.--was a wonderful pediatrician, about 5 feet 2, blonde, smart and warm and funny as hell but never sarcastic or even accidentally mean, who would retreat into her office with the mini-cassette recorder after seeing a kid referred in from somewhere, spend an hour slaving over a report, with much pausing and rewinding and fast-forwarding and so forth, and finally emerge, hand me the cassette and say, “work your magic!” That my “magic” amounted mostly to punctuating, getting the grammar right (not that she ever had any problem with that), spelling everything correctly, etc., didn’t matter--she truly thought, and made me feel, that I “added value” in the process. And so I probably did.
I cared about her, and wanted to help make her “look” as good as I possibly could.
Working “remotely,” I try to recapture that same kind of “bond,” but it’s tough.
Familiarity may breed contempt, but absence of familiarity can do the same, and either way, it sucks.
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