No spinning today. Mr L has a work crisis on and I need to stay home on puppy duty, especially as I have a meeting myself this afternoon.
Sometimes I think that it sounds strange when I say that I cannot go out because of the dogs – it’s not the full story, of course…
… Mr L works for a very large multi-national company. He works in IT, on a project basis, from home. The company is multi-site, of course and projects trend to work across sites, with completely off-site people like Mr L on their teams. Thus, meetings are held by conference phone. Meetings can be several hours long – far too long to nurse a telephone to an ear. Mr L deals with this by using a speaker phone.
Now, dogs have good ears – and they hear strange voices in the ether. They may bark sometimes. Company managers do not need good ears in order to hear dogs barking… My task is to keep animals at the other end of the house and thereby maintain a professional atmosphere in the office. I also get to let dogs and cats in and out of the house as their bladders dictate. (Dogs go out to pee, cats, being cats, come in to use their trays– drat ’em!) It drives the worker barmy when cats scratch at the office window in order to be let in when he is on the phone.
Long meetings also mean that people need feeding. Staff on company sites get food delivered to them. Mr L gets food delivered to him by me. If I am not here, he does not get fed.
Planned meetings are not so very bad and sometimes we can work around them. Ad hoc crisis meetings are far more problematical for us – adding in the factor of Mr L’s stress levels just makes things worse.
That’s why I do not go to spinning on crisis days. Ad hoc meetings can arise at any time and, as predicted, there is one in fifteen minutes – bang on lunch time.
Instead of going spinning I have addressed myself to housework, and the heady delights of cleaning cat trays. Why is it that no cat can bear the sight of a clean tray, and must always rush to despoil it the moment it is laid proudly on the floor by the hard-working cleaner. Eh? Sometimes I do believe Lulu would jump into the tray in mid-air if she could, to mark it before it ever hits the ground.
I could do with a soothing hour of spinning in the sitting room but I have to go cook lunch for when the meeting breaks.
It’s a good job that I love him, isn’t it? 🙂