Over the past three years, I have built up quite a reputation among family and friends. My sister likes to bring up the time I took a midafternoon nap in my car…in the company parking lot. My former roommate always expected me home around 4 o’ clock. Hewould be angry if we had tentative plans to go somewhere on his day off and I would come home ‘late’ around 5 o’ clock.
The problem with amassing such a reputation is that it becomes difficult to receive any type of sympathy from these people regarding work.
If I have one of those (extremely) rare days when I’ve been slammed at work and a little stressed out, I usually hear one of the following comments when I begin speaking about it to friends.
“It’s about time they made you do something!”
“That makes up for all the times you come home at 4 o clock.”
“Oh, poor baby….you actually had to work today!?!?”
“So you mean you didn’t get your two hour lunch?” (Don’t worry—I always get my two hour lunch.)
Slacking at work also makes people expect more out of you outside of work. If you haven’t kept up on your emails or been cleaning up your living space, people use your self pronounced slackerdom against you.
“You’ve got all day to email people! What did you do today at work?”
“You don’t do any work all day, the least you could do when you come home is help keep the place clean.”
I also run into the situation where people come into town and expect me to be able to skip work every time. Sure I have before, but sometimes it’s not possible to do so.
Sigh…people don’t realize that slacking takes a lot of time and effort in and of itself. How about some sympathy for my troubles every once in a while?
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