Work Interruptions
I was raised by people who didn’t interrupt the working spouse. My family was very traditional: dad went to the office; mom stayed home and ran the household. My dad’s family was the same. But my mom’s was very different: her mom was a vice-president at one of the largest regional banks in our city, and her dad owned his own business. With that family dynamic, Mom was raised with very strict ideas about interrupting someone’s workday with home concerns, and she passed those ideas on to us kids.
Mom didn’t call dad at the office very often. It had to be a real emergency—copious amounts of blood, or fire—something dire. She didn’t need to call him, really. Daddy trusted her to know what needed to be done, and do it. So there just wasn’t much reason for Mom to interrupt Daddy’s workday.
So I was amazed, when I started working in offices, to find the wives of my bosses and co-workers calling their husbands frequently, with what seemed to me to be either trivialities or questions with very obvious, common-sense answers.
I remember one man whose wife called him six or seven times a day. I didn’t know what to think about this. Was her husband so controlling that she had to report in on her every move? Was she lacking in self-confidence and dependent on him to make decisions? Was she dumb, and he was afraid she’d make some appalling mistake?
And then one day she called in hysterics because the kitchen faucet was spraying water all over the place. I was stunned. Did she not know how to use the cutoff valve to stop the water? Was she not supposed to call the plumber without his permission? Did she not know that she needed a plumber? Did she not know who the family’s plumber was? I was baffled—my mother would have turned off the water and called the plumber, and would have called my dad at lunch-time to let him know that there had been a problem. She certainly would not have been in hysterics over a broken faucet, and she would not have interrupted his work over it.
But I kept running into women like this. Women who were really nice, profoundly intelligent, great moms– women I really liked … but who pestered their husbands at work with what seemed to me to be very trivial stuff, and often stuff that I thought could have waited until lunch or after work. So I decided that maybe my parents were just old-fashioned, and that this was how the modern work world operated.
Until I started my most recent job. My boss’s wife almost never calls him at work. In five years, I’ve taken maybe eight calls from her. At first I thought maybe it was just that she called his cell when she needed something. But today, I found out otherwise. She called while he was in a meeting.
Now, my rule is that the boss’s wife gets instant access, no matter what. My boss could be meeting with Israel’s Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and Barack Obama, and I would interrupt if his wife called. So I interrupted the meeting. I could tell my boss was preoccupied, because at first he looked annoyed. “The look” crossed his face—the look that means “why are you bugging me; take a message.” And then it seemed to register that it was his wife calling. He hesitated. Then he turned to the people he was meeting with and said, “She never calls me. Excuse me a minute.” And he took the call.
I learned two things from this little incident. First, that my boss has his priorities in the right place, and that he loves and respects his wife. That’s nice to know. Confirms my opinion of him as a good man. But second, that my boss’s wife respects his work enough to bother him only when it’s necessary.
See, when the other wife called her husband at work, he would always be impatient and irritated, and he would often ask me to take a message. She called so often that he no longer took the calls seriously. Whereas my current boss’s wife, because she calls so seldom, got my boss’s immediate attention.
Sometimes, I guess, it’s not the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.