Chapter 18: A Real Office

Dexter dropped the kids off in front of the hospital so that they could visit their mother. They had instructions to send him an e-mail when they were ready to be picked up. He gave them the e-mail address for the website since he was going to swing by the apartment to check up on it and try to start another article. He wasn’t ready to give them his cell phone number. He was sure that they would give it to Janet and she’d be calling all of the time to rub his nose in her affair.

He still had his old phone. It was filled with calls, text messages, and e-mails from Janet. He ignored them. Of course, there hadn’t been a single call from the kids. That was just another reminder of his relative importance or, more accurately, the lack of importance that he had in their lives.

While driving to his apartment he thought about what might be a suitable topic for his next article. He wasn’t sure what business woe to address next, but his conversation with Ken the previous evening had given him some ideas. Like everyone else, he had abused more than one new-hire to meet the demands of the overwhelming pile of work that was dumped on him. Shit rolled downhill and pity the poor person at the bottom.

Thoughts about Ken reminded him of the later events of that evening. The drive home from the hospital had been quiet. He assumed that the kids were tired from their day in school and evening at the hospital. It dawned on him that they might be worried about their mother. He decided that he could make some generalized comments about recovering after appendectomy without having to talk about Janet explicitly. Their reaction had been lukewarm at best. Sarah had continued to text her friends while Will stared out the window.

Breakfast was at a chain restaurant that morning so there hadn’t really been much of a chance for conversation. The public environment made conversation about any topic of substance impossible ... a fact for which Dexter was most appreciative. It was crowded. The tables were packed together so that there wasn’t much room to sit in the seat. His knees were hitting Will’s knees under the table. He wondered if tables had shrunk. He didn’t remember people not being able to sit comfortably in diners in the past.

The service there had been lousy, but Dexter didn’t expect otherwise. The waitress had never offered him a refill on his coffee. No one delivered water to the table. The orders had been taken, the food delivered, and the bill dropped off on the table. Dexter didn’t leave a tip.

When he finally arrived at the apartment, he was surprised to find Eric in the study working on the computer.

As he walked in, he said, “Hello, Eric.”

“Hi, Dexter. Everything work out all right yesterday?” Eric asked.

“Yep,” Dexter answered. “What are you doing here?”

“Just answering a couple of the e-mails,” Eric answered.

“It’s Saturday. You don’t have to be here,” Dexter said.

“I figured you’d be busy with the kids and all, so I came in to clear out some of the e-mails,” Eric answered.

“Why not just do it from home?” Dexter asked.

It seemed to be a waste of time to drive to his apartment just for a few e-mails. Eric grinned upon hearing the question.

He asked, “Are you giving me a ‘home office’ stipend?”

“Huh?”

“Are you going to help defray the cost of having a ‘home office’?” Eric asked.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Dexter said.

“Well, think about it. Until you pay me to maintain a ‘home office’, I’m not working at home,” Eric said.

Dexter grinned when he realized what Eric was saying. It had always irritated him that he had to pay out of his own pocket to get a machine loaded with his office’s software, in order to be able to work from home.

“I think we have the topic for our next article,” Dexter said.

“You bet!” Eric said.

“You know. I was spending a shitload of money for that damned company,” Dexter said.

“Same here,” Eric said. “It dawned on me last night when I went to boot up my computer, that I had gotten it for work. I don’t keep my home budget on it. In fact, there is nothing of a personal nature on that machine. All my personal stuff is on an older computer.”

“Same here,” Dexter said.

“I also figure that you should rent an office and work there rather than at home,” Eric said.

“Why?” Dexter asked.

He was surprised that Eric was trying to tell him how to run his business.

Eric said, “Your website is always harping on how you have to separate your work life from your private life. You should eat your own dog food before you start selling it to others.”

Dexter shook his head as he asked, “Where do you get those witty sayings?”

“If you hang with an enough mangy dogs, you’re bound to pick up a few fleas,” Eric answered with a grin.

“So what do you suggest?”

Eric said, “I noticed an office building on my way over here with an advertisement for offices starting at three hundred a month. You should look into it.”

“I’ll do that,” Dexter said.

“Also, we need to establish scheduled work hours,” Eric said.

“What do you suggest?” Dexter asked.

Eric said, “I’ll work Tuesday through Saturday if you’ll work Sunday through Thursday.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Dexter said. “You’ll be able to keep your family day that way.”

“That was my thinking on the matter,” Eric said.

“It still gives me a day off on the weekend,” Dexter said, thinking that it wasn’t a bad arrangement. He thought about it for a moment more, and then asked, “What would you think of four day workweeks?”

“That’s even better,” Eric said.

“Wednesday through Saturday for you and Sunday through Wednesday for me,” Dexter said.

He could use the overlapping day to run errands out of the office. They could hold a meeting that day to sort out any issues that might have arisen. He figured that Eric was smart enough to give him a call if there was something really important that had to be addressed.

“Ten hour work days?” Eric asked.

“No. We’ll stay with eight unless there’s a problem,” Dexter said. “I’ll post the article on Tuesday. That way the majority of replies will be on the day we both work.”

“Sounds good to me,” Eric said. He was quiet for a moment and then said, “Of course, some people might not be happy about not getting an immediate answer to their e-mail.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Dexter said.

“Fuck ‘em?”

Dexter said, “This is a website about keeping work and life separate. We’ll just put a notice on the site that we have fixed working hours ... just like they should ... and let them know that we’ll answer things during our operating hours.”

“When you eat your own dog food, you take really big bites!” Eric said.

“Where am I wrong?” Dexter asked.

“You aren’t wrong, though the visitors to our website might disagree,” Eric said.

“The internet is twenty-four/seven, but that doesn’t mean that we have to be twenty-four/seven. We’ve got our lives to live. I’m not hiring six more people so that Joe Shmoe can get an answer to his e-mail at three o’clock in the morning,” Dexter said feeling the rightness of his words.