Throwing Down the Race Card

I'm not one to get on the political bandwagon (although I do think our country was in a much better way when a certain sax player was running the show), but I may have to do so in my work environment today. Not so much in terms of who's running our country as it is who's running the office.

It's now 10:00pm (the above paragraph was written about twelve hours ago). Here's the situation: I telecommute a couple of hours every day and have been since my daughter started school. I do so in order to take her to school (since daddy works the death shift). After I drop her off, it's off to the office I go to work the remainder of the day (the office, you'll recall, is more than thirty miles away). To make a very long story short, there are those who telecommute full time, but I seem to always get cut off at the knees when I ask about doing so for any length of time. Okay, maybe to put it a better way is I always seem to feel very guilty about asking, after my request is granted with multiple stipulations.

My years of seniority don't seem to matter and that just adds salt to the wound. I found out yesterday afternoon that I seem to be the only one documenting what I do each morning where there are multiple employees who telecommute full-time and have never done so. This morning, I spoke to one of our VPs (that I'm friendly with and trust) who has two employees under her telecommuting. She does not require it of either one of them. In fact, her boss recently asked her if she had additional employees who wanted to, in order to free up office space. I should mention that her boss was the one who told my boss to "find a way for her to document how she spends her hours." Hmmmm.

Well, is it distrust? I'm crushed, if it is. After six years, many accolades and an award to show that I'm worthy, are there possibly those that don't trust me? Or...dum, dum, dum, dum...is it race? I hate to even through that out there but, there are those who have worked less than a year, who went through no probationary periods and reside in our community (could easily come into the office to work). These individuals all telecommute and are of European decent (if you wanna get technical, so am I...but you couldn't tell by looking at me).

I talked to my mom, who has been in HR for years, and she suggested that I talk to my boss. So, I did. He was shocked and had no idea about these people and their lack of documentation. I was not surprised in the least. My boss is a kind, decent man and in general a rare breed of human. He's sees the best in people and always will. Much of the time, the other management staff are much more aggressive and are "climbers". This does not interest my boss. He doesn't participate in gossip and pretty much does his job, socializes a bit with us in the office, then goes home. There are plenty of times when we (his department) are more in the know about the goings on in the office than he is.

I don't mean to imply that he's a door-mat, just not one for conflict if it can be prevented. He's gone to bat for me plenty of times. He's honestly the best boss I've ever had. With our discussion, he was eager to seek out the reasons why and help level the tables if possible. I indicated that I wouldn't have balked at documenting my time spent, but once I heard no one else had to, I was really quite bothered. I also inquired as to if there were policies beginning and they are using me as a test, if there was distrust with what I was doing or "heaven forbid it's a race issue." He squirmed a bit at that, but seemed ready to discover the truth. I hope he does because being the Aquarius that I am, I want everything to be fair. I was really nervous before going in, but I'm certainly glad that I asked. It just always seemed to be such a touchy subject.

Now, it's late (for me) and I'm blogging about the events of the day still worried a bit about the possible outcome. I don't want to stir the pot for others who haven't had to, only to have that put into place for them and then they find out it was me (Ugh!). I shouldn't care about what they think, but I do. Three of them are terrific people and I'm glad they get the opportunity to telecommute and I also consider them friends. I want them to have that option for however long they want it, but I also want to open up the options for myself, too. Paranoia is creeping up on me more than usual...TOM hasn't appeared yet. I need a hormone dump quick and in a hurry! (I know, too much information).