The sole requirement placed upon me by my employer in order to work from home was that I install a land line phone. For years I'd used just a cell phone. My wife and I each had a phone, and our creditors didn't have the number for either. It worked well for us. But the cell phone wasn't suitable for conference calls or voice consultations, primarily because the only place I could get decent reception was when I was standing on the deck. Abby was born in January. It's damn cold outside when you're on the phone with long-winded librarians. Dragging the computer and several babies outside is, to say the least, undesirable.
I ended up with a voice-over-IP phone system which was really pretty good when it worked. Unfortunately everyone I know either had a phone on the fritz or was on a cell phone. I would be months before I could figure out whether my service was crappy or my friends and business acquaintances all had bad telco karma.
My first consultation was an informal one with a fellow employee of relatively close status. No pressure, just talking through some problems. The entire family was in the room with me, and the nature of the problem required me to use both hands on the computer and set the phone on speaker. It was a pretty tedious problem, the sort that requires brute force debugging rather than some tidbit of arcane knowledge. It took a while.
In a room with four kids and a post-surgery wife, you have about thirty seconds between incidents. They may be small or heart-stoppingly terrifying, but every time you take care of one, the clock starts ticking.
Dan: “It works in Firefox but not in IE. I'm sending you the files and my test cases.”
Me: “Okay, got it. Let's have a look at the query string first I think there may be a ... Hey Liam, help Katie with her pants. For crying out loud the girl is walking around with her drawers around her ankles. No don't pull 'em off, just help her take 'em off ... problem with the hex encoding of the special chars.”
30 seconds to next crisis.
Dan: “Um. Right, the um.... pants encoding. Right. No, I don't think that's the issue. It's a separate problem, let's take a look at the search result. I get nothing in IE. I get three results in Firefox.
Me: “Okay, I'm getting caught up now. Lemme just take a look at....”
Abby: “AHHHHHH! UHAH!UWAH!UWAHHHHHHHH!”
15 seconds early.
Me: “and add the debug alert on line 27. That way we can see if...”
Abby: “AHHHHHH! UHAH!UWAH!UWAHHHHHHHH!”
Pamela is taking care of the outburst. It appears to be a booby-related issue. Reset the clock.
Me: “IE is throwing an error that firebug isn't catching.”
Dan, the epitome of courtesy: “I'm, sorry I didn't quite catch that. One more time?”
Me: “You heard me. Stop jumping on the gate. Stop teasing your sister. No, don't fast forward Bob Bob Pants. Just let it play for god's sake.”
Dan: “Line 27 was it?”
Me: “Why are you not listening to me? I'm gonna count to three.”
Reset the clock to 30 seconds to meltdown. Add 15 seconds for pouting.
Dan: “Is this a bad time?”
And here is where the pieces began to fall into place. This was of course a perfectly good time. Then it occurred to me that when the conversation began with Dan, he had asked whether I was watching cartoons. Of course I was watching cartoons. What else would be on TV when I needed to hypnotize my children for a few minutes? Obviously I went with Spongebob Squarepants. What thinking parent wouldn't? He thought that my fractured sentences and multiple threads of thought, chastisement, and psychotic outbursts were some indication of something unusual. It came to me all at once. Shit. The guy has no children. He had no idea what was going on there. He thought I was sitting in my recliner watching cartoons and tap-tap-tapping on the keyboard between sips of imported water and uninterrupted minutes of deep contemplation. I guess to him that would be a bad time. To a father, it's just the only time available. It has to be the right time.
My second experience with the conference call was a whole other animal. I was to call in to a meeting on Monday. It was Thursday, so there was plenty of time to review the whitepapers and what-not . I got an IM from my boss while I was working on one of my two number one top priority projects. Tim: “You going to call into the Edu meeting?”
Me: “I thought it was on Monday.”
Tim: “No, it was five minutes ago. Can you call in now?”
Me: “Of course!”
What else could I say? At the moment I was feeding the two week old Abby. She was fussy. I ran for the VoIP phone and called in.
Me: “Hi!”
Some random guy: “and that's why our technology is great and you should do this.”
Apparently this phone in technology doesn't work in the way I'm used to. I just interrupted the tech guy.
A moment of silence.
Random guy: “As I was saying, many of our clients are using this technique and it works well for them.”
I'm so screwed. This is the second time I've come into a meeting unprepared. They're going to tear me apart. I log onto the online demo. These people are the ones who built systems for the Discovery channel. Abby is in the crook of my left arm and I'm holding the bottle in my right hand, occasionally shifting it to balance on my left manboob so I can type or click. I absorb as much as I can in the few minutes I hear and watch the presentation, then I'm asked for my opinion. My phone is, of course, on speakerphone.
Me: “I think the CUI would give us the benefit of rapid development though the REST interface would allow more control in how we display the data we get from the service. If we can use both....”
And here I paused. There was a strong vibration on the inside of my left elbow. Abby, her brow furrowed and eyes focused far in the distance, was pooping. Enthusiastically. Gaseously. These were not the cute little pop-pop-pop of baby farts, but an earnest, resonating, butt-cheek flapping explosion of gas and feces. And her adorable pointy little butt was about four inches from the speakerphone. And then, like a broadway star, I continued as if nothing had happened. As if there was no shocked silence. As if some of the most important people in web development that I had ever met were not at that very moment wondering if I had just busted ass straight into the phone. No point explaining. They were all in business mode and here I was, half dad, half tech guy, holding a gassy baby and doing my best to represent the technical skill of the United States Government. I can't be one or the other anymore.
