My children have two special skills. The first is to commando crawl on the floor of my office to retrieve an item located on the other side, without any part of their body appearing on my computer screen. The second is to pass notes under the door urgently asking for snacks, a favour they know I will grant, to keep them quiet.
These skills are well-used. From 2010-2015, I worked from home occasionally and often on my ‘days off’. My three-children-under-seven quickly learned to accommodate it: the look of terror on my face as they threatened to interrupt conference calls with their high-pitched whines was enough for them to identify alternative ways to communicate. I have visions of them in the future reminiscing with other kids-of-wfh-ers about the far-fetched mechanisms they deployed to be noticed but not seen or heard. Commando crawling in mum’s office will be ‘sooooo twenty-tens’.
No-one did anything specific to make me feel that children should be invisible. Nevertheless, I instinctively felt that work and home should be entirely separate. The thought of a child’s voice on a business call - even on my day off – was horrifying. Like admitting that there were important things in life other than work. Shudder.
Fast forward to April 2020 and Simmons & Simmons issues a light-hearted apology for an unintended interruption on the firm’s Instagram account by a child of a colleague: "Sorry about the dancing child live post this week. Obviously not meant for our corporate account. The reality of working from home with kids around is posing a whole new world of challenges!" One cannot help but feel that this, followed by Roll-on-Friday’s tag of ‘Do the Simmons' was seen by Simmons’ PR department, not as a liability, but as an entirely zeitgeist opportunity to demonstrate the firm’s humanity.
2010 to 2020: how times have changed. Shorn of the (usually office-based) physical attributes of power and status that distance us from one-another, we’ve shared our vulnerability and humanity like never before. The question now is whether the Normal People that have emerged will hang around.
