Corporate Life

Is the enemy of the modern family, writes Laura at 11D:

My husband came home last Friday night and announced that his boss wants him to start carrying around a Blackberry. He also said that Steve wasn’t being a team player, because he didn’t go drinking with his co-workers on Friday nights.

Let me get this straight. He’s gone from the house for 60 hours per week. He sees his kids for an hour per day. And now he’s supposed to be checking his e-mail, while he watches his kid’s soccer game. The people that he spends 10 hours a day with are making him spend more time in the evening with them, so they can do jello shots and pat each other on the back for closing all those deals. As he’s pounding shots and head butting the other guys, the kids and I are supposed to amuse ourselves.

After I processed this information, I arranged the words, words shit, fuck and damn, in all sorts of unique combinations.

Lucky for Laura, her husband's company may be a bit late for jumping on the Blackberry bandwagon. (Max says "whatever you might think about Blackberrys as a cultural phenomenon, that patent suit is ridiculous." Yes. But if Max ever showed up with a Blackberry I would run it over with the car.)

You would think that those of us on left and right who think that families are important could unite to do something about this problem. For many years, I have thought that the very best thing that we could do for families would be to mandate several more weeks' vacation time each year. Not a complicated policy, just a simple and obvious one: families need time to spend together.

oof, I would like to say something else about this, but a freshly bathed child is shrieking in my ear. "I want press apple button!"