Work It.

In early January I was asked by a client to take on a design job for a major software company, whose name I won't mention here as I would hate for them to be associated with a site that can be found by Googling the words gagging crack whores. I will say that the owner of the company is an extremely wealthy man, so wealthy that I've heard his mansion overlooking Seattle is made of solid gold bricks and that he can often be found on his lawn raking $1000 bills into big piles for his children to jump into. These may be rumors and in no way influenced the sudden spike in my hourly design fee nor my uncharacteristic enthusiasm for earning a wage.

This whole recent job started off smoothly enough but soon evolved into a much more complicated project. As the deadline neared the time constraints became apparant and as usual I found myself struggling to figure out where my priorities lay and how to successfully manage my career and home. For instance, if the client is asking for a complete re-design of the piece I just sent out, do I have one margarita or two glasses of wine to dull the pain? These are the types of important questions that have plagued me in my quest to find a meaningful balance between a professional and personal life.

For the past ten years I have worked out of my home. Prior to that I had a studio downtown with several employees, but once I got pregnant with Kira I decided that it was the perfect time to scale down and set up a home office in order to spend time with her and the ten subsequent children I planned to give birth to. Although that number was reluctantly scaled down to two, I feel my decision to work at home was a good one. I'm grateful every day to be able to earn a living while avoiding human interaction with clients and vendors, an activity that used to put a serious crimp in my personal time. Call it sick, but there is something unmistakably subversive in being able to conduct business over the phone with the biggest software company on the planet while wearing only your pajama bottoms and a bra.

In the beginning of my work-at-home odyssey I struggled with the degree of professionalism I could manage to uphold. I felt that even though I spent entire days with my hair unbrushed and wearing a bathrobe stained with baby spittle, it was best not to disclose that to a client. I became accustomed to explaining the wailing in the background as 'some crazy neighbor's cat' and making scribbling noises on the diaper pad to simulate furious note-taking. I soon found, however, that attempting to discuss serious business while trying to hide the fact that a ten-pound human is suckling at your breast is inherently impossible and I decided to come clean. Anyone who couldn't handle the fact that I was a working mom was not anyone I would want to work with in the first place, I declared, pumping my fist in the air Norma Rae fashion. The three brave clients that remained were rewarded handsomely with riveting stories about sleep deprivation and musings about various hues of baby poop and their number coordinates on the Pantone color chart.

These days I still try and conduct business in the same manner I vowed to, although the subject matter has evolved over the years and I've gotten more selective about the details of my life I choose to disclose, especially with new clients. So when the job came in early this year from that company I made it a point to be a little more discreet. While I was still honest about the fact that our conference call would have to wait until I got back from my daughter's school orchestra performance, I stopped short of admitting that that night's cable showing of 'EuroTrip' would hinder my ability to get those layout revisions done overnight. I felt this allowed me to have some semblance of professionalism along with the appearance of involved parenting, while also concealing from these captains of industry my poor taste in television. It's a win-win situation.

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