I’m off to moderate a parenting panel—”Our communities, our careers and our families: Being an LGBT parent in the workplace”—at the Out and Equal Workplace Summit.
Because I have workplace issues on my mind, I thought I’d ask all of you:
Please share your funniest (or most memorable) experience of being a parent in the workplace—or of transitioning to become a stay-at-home parent.
Mine has to be leaving a business dinner to go shoot up fertility hormones in the rest room. (Usually, I did this at home, but the last one before egg retrieval required very precise timing.) It felt very illicit, somehow.
Or maybe it was nine months later when I mentioned to fellow meeting participants—as I stood there very visibly flat-stomached—that if I ran out suddenly, it was because I was having a baby. (For those who don’t know: I provided the egg; my spouse carried it.)
Surely some of you can top that, especially those who have had occasion to bring your kids into the workplace. Leave a comment!
At my previous job, I was in charge of several critical pieces of lab equipment. A couple other people in my department decided to do a software upgrade on the equipment while I was out, couldn’t get it to work, and then telephoned me in a panic when they couldn’t even get the systems back to functional with the original software. What made it memorable: they telephoned me at the hospital while I was in labor. And this was in the days before cell phones, so they really were calling a hospital phone number, knowing I was in labor.
I consider my response to have been highly professional, since I managed to tell them, “I really can’t help you right now; you’re going to have to figure this one out yourselves,” without actually calling them insensitive idiots.
(To be fair, once I had the child, my entire department was quite considerate of my need to balance work and parenting. That phone call was fortunately not a sign of things to come!)