Wednesday, March 15, 2006

work me, home me

I never realized how different my work self and my home self really are, until the gap started to narrow as my vacation approaches. Some part of my brain must normally be involved in maintaining the home me/work me split. Suddenly the real me is popping out at unopportune times.

At work, I'm Lorraine. At home, I'm Raine. Work is work clothes with real shoes. Home is sneakers and jeans and sweats. Work gets one set of vocabulary, home gets another. At work, I'm a professional. At home, I'm a slacker.

But when I'm tired, under stress, approaching vacation, the thin walls that separate the two seem to vanish. A co-worker joked about my taking too long to answer a question and I told her to "bite me". We both laughed, but she did comment that she couldn't believe I said that. Me either.

People walking outside my office are currently being treated to the Clash and the Ramones at peak volume. I wore sneakers yesterday, breaking the dress code yet again. I'm about 3 inches away from nachos and beer for lunch.

Now I'm wondering if Raine should come to work every day? what would that be like? and how did it happen that I stopped bringing me to work?

1 comment:

Kitten Herder said...

As much as I loath my current job, the one of the things that I like about it is that I am totally me there. I've had jobs before where I "dressed" for work, and maintained a professional demeanor in meetings. It was do-able (and I'm sure I'll have to get used to doing that again). However, there's something to be said for an office environment where I frequently tell my direct manager to "bite me". I also recently responded to my CEO's commentary about an indian style shirt I was wearing by holding up three fingers close together. He smiled and said, "remind me again what that means". And I smiled and said "read between the lines": the politically toned down way of flipping someone off. He shook his head and laughed. Everyone is used to my flip humor and candor. It doesn't get in the way of the work that we do. As a matter of fact, being able to be myself makes me much more productive since I'm much more focused on the substance and not the appearance of things. Alas, this too will pass.