QWhen I was a freelancer, because I was constantly working at home, I was entitled to the recurring thoughts of a retired neighbor, who did not really understand what I was doing. “So, always on vacation! », she told me, when I passed her in the common areas of our building. I do not blame him. I completely understand that, for a lady of a certain age who has had a time-consuming job in small business, seeing a guy only leave his house to go and get supplies at the supermarket or evacuate the garbage cans, it does not ” active life “. With my children, it’s a bit the same. When they see me working from home, usually in my three-stripe tracksuit and my fir green fleece that wouldn’t look out of place in a hunter’s club, I sense that they don’t take me quite seriously – the proof, they come to talk to me all the time as I try to concentrate.
It is because work in its common sense still responds to a certain formalism (offices, colleagues, a coffee machine) that taking your child to your company remains an event with high added value. This allows, by the sole persuasive power of the decor, to prove to him that we are really working; operation close to mentalism, which I had the opportunity to carry out just last week. My youngest son’s teacher was on strike, the school did not welcome students and, without a solution, I said to myself that it was finally a rather nice idea to introduce him to the wonderful world of open space , a biotope where stainless steel kettles and plastic plants thrive. I might as well take advantage of the fact that my company has not switched to flex office or “full remote”.
Going to the office means going to a mythical place, so often mentioned during conversations that it inevitably gives rise to fantasies, speculations, even worries. In a survey by the Observatoire de la parentalité en entreprise, published in 2010, 63% of young people aged 14 to 17 said they perceived their parents’ work as ” stressful “, ” tiring “even ” hard “. If my children have sometimes reproached me for working too much, they do not seem to share this negative view of my work. On D-Day, my son is all hopping, as if he was leaving for Disneyland. He took with him a small notebook to draw, a homework book and some Pokémon cards. And combed his hair in the elevator mirror.
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