Wow, this is a hard one. Because I don’t feel like I’ve taken the path less travelled. I’m a middle-class white woman who went to high school, went to college, married a man, is raising a family, and now has a job. Isn’t that the most travelled road for my demographic in the developed world?
I guess the only way I may have taken a less travelled road is to follow my heart in terms of the work I do. When I realized my college degree wasn’t in a field that I felt passion for, I lost interest and pursued my love du jour, which was helping with fundraising and athletic endurance events for a not-for-profit. I cared about my work and threw myself into even thought the pay was terrible and the hours were long. I think a lot of people put a lot more financial value on their time than I ever did. I couldn’t stand the thought of being bored in my work, so if a job sparked my passion, that passion was a higher priority to me than money.
Likewise, when we started our family, we knew we wanted one of us to stay home with our kids while the other worked. Since my husband was on a career path, I volunteered as tribute. He was a graduate student on a teaching stipend, and me staying home without earning was not the wisest financial decision we’ve ever made. Having a second child under the same circumstance was even dumber (financially). We will be paying for those years for at least another decade.
During those years that I stayed home, though, I bonded with our kids, I launched a business, and I began writing in earnest, all of which led me to the place I am now: working at a dream job that pulls from my my random skill sets, that I’m passionate about, that keeps me at home with our kids, and that actually pays well. So I guess following my heart, if that is a road less traveled by, did make all the difference.
For the month of April, I will be publishing a 10-minute free write each day, initiated by a prompt from my prompt box. Minimal editing. No story. Just thoughts spilling onto the page. Thank you to Writeanne for the prompt, I took the road less travelled by, And that has made all the difference, from “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost.
I wasn’t sure if I’d be writing a whole series this week on my life as an Automattician, but today was so different from yesterday, I felt compelled. My Monday Day in the Life was very, well, Monday, with scheduling and time slots and laundry and my first attempt at training new hires.
And today? Today I’m listening to the rain and wind outside my “office”* window. I’m wearing slippers and a sweatshirt from our daughter’s swim team, and though it seems strange to say it when the only sounds I hear any day are the tapping of my fingers on my keyboard and the gentle chime notifying me when people are logging onto chat, today was much quieter than yesterday. Yesterday was action. Today was contemplation.
I started my day at 6:00 am, just as I’ve done for the past two years before I landed this job. I love the quiet of morning, and I used to get up at 6:00 am to write and drink my coffee before the household wakes up. After a long writing-related conversation with a coworker yesterday, I pulled out my pen and composition book while my coffee brewed this morning, and I wrote again for the first time in weeks.
After writing, I sat on the couch with my feet up on the coffee table and read some of Wendy’s fiction, along with the Day in the Life posts of other coworkers, while I relaxed into the day. Tuesdays are one of my early days – early to start and early to end – when my husband is on deck for lunchboxes and bus stop. On Tuesdays and Fridays I start work early so that I can finish up the day in time to squeeze in an afternoon walk or swim. Along with writing, exercise has lost its place in my new-life-with-a-full-time-job, and we are iterating on our family schedule to build it back in.
I moved down to my desk around 7:15 when the kids woke up, and I started working through some of my followups from yesterday – notifying a user about a bug that wasn’t actually a bug, notifying a user about a bug that was actually a bug, giving feedback to the training core team on how my training session went – and lots of reading on the internal P2s. When I transitioned to full time, the hiring squad set me up with a mentor, Caroline. I told her recently, “I’ve spent the past couple of days reading relevant P2 posts, there’s no ‘product’ at the end of that – no ticket or chat closed – so it feels like I’m slacking off, you know?”
She knew.
I am guilty of thinking I’m ‘not working’ when I’m reading P2s,” she said, “But that’s a huge part of our jobs! It’s all the talks and meetings we’d have if we were working in a traditional office. So it’s still important, and counts.
So today I thought, and I wrote, and I read, and I chatted. Live chat got a little crazy for a bit this morning when I was trying to help one user set up a complicated theme, help another user troubleshoot a domain issue, follow up on a ticket, answer a VIP plugin chat, and respond to a ping from a Happiness Engineer trial regarding plans and upgrades.
I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague. – from the Automattic creed.
Part of a Happiness Engineer’s job is to engineer happiness for everyone – users and coworkers alike – and while I put the ticket on hold and tackled other issues, HEs on the Store and VIP teams helped me with the domain and plugin issues while I helped with the theme and upgrade issues. It is chaos, but it’s a refined chaos that works, with everyone working together to help each other find not just solutions, but a rewarding, human experience.
During lunch I lined up the resources I need to enroll in the company 401K plan, took care of a couple more followups, and then I set up a lunch date for Friday. I love the solitude of working from home, but there is a definite danger of becoming a hermit, so I scheduled time to get out into the world on Friday and have lunch with my husband. We’ll get food we can never convince the kids to eat, like Indian or Thai. Or maybe Mexican.
In the afternoon I fielded more live chats and updated the support document for the Stay theme. Several users in chat have had trouble setting up the Slider, so with some help from the Theme team I was able to get the instructions in a little bit better shape.
Since I started early today, I was able to wrap up my day just as my son was walking in the door from school. I considered staying online and working more, but I know I need to write and exercise to keep myself me. Posts from other Automatticians in this series have shown me it’s not only okay to sign off at the end of the day, or to take breaks for walks or to watch a baseball game in the middle of the day, but that it’s good to do that.
I did productive work today, but I also thought a lot and recharged. And thanks to that thinking and recharging, I know, as Hemingway always advised writers to know at the end of the day, where I will begin tomorrow.
*My office is a desk in our basement rec room.
In an effort to get to know each other’s work days better, and to share publicly what it is like to work for a distributed company where most of us work from home, some of us at Automattic will be publishing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs throughout this week. The posts will be tagged #a8cday if you’d like to follow along.
When I applied for my job as a Happiness Engineer, I wasn’t entirely sure what the job would entail. The job title is unique, for sure, and when I wore my Happiness Engineer T-shirt on my way to the company’s Grand Meetup, three different people stopped me to ask “What’s a Happiness Engineer?” All three smiled when I told them.
Before I became an Automattician, I’d seen Happiness Engineers write Daily Post and Hot off the Press articles, speak at WordCamps, provide live support in Happiness Bars at WordCamps, answer questions in the public forums, and answer my own questions about my blog through email requests. Given that knowledge, I created the above Venn diagram for my résume when I applied.
Once I started working as a Happiness Engineer, though, I realized there need to be about 20 more fields in that diagram: Domain Dominator, Toy Tester, P2 Poster, Ticket Translator, User Empathizer, Live Chat Champion. Even now, I only know what my day looks like, and not what other HEs’ days look like.
Over the next week, many Happiness Engineers and other Automatticians, including myself, will be sharing “A Day in the Life” posts on our personal blogs. I’ve got a big day planned today – I’ll be training new Happiness trials for my first time – but I’ll try to keep notes so I can share with you when the day is done. If you have any questions or special requests for what you’d like to see in my post(s), please let me know in the comments below. And if you think you’d like to work with us but aren’t quite clear on what the job might entail, be sure to follow along! We will be using the tag #a8cday.
I can’t wipe this grin off my face. Remember that job I’ve been alluding to and that I’ve been working towards the past few months? I got it!
On September 4, 2014 – my 40th birthday – I begin my career with Automattic, a web company that describes its services using haiku, that has employees distributed all over the world, and whose creed begins “I will never stop learning.”
And oh yeah, Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com.
I am now an ecstatic and enormously proud member of a working family whose passion I share: to democratize publishing. In my role as a Happiness Engineer I will work my heart out to help WordPress.com users in their quest to put their work out into the world – their photography, writing, podcasts, videos; their wedding pages, book blogs, portfolios, caregiver stories; their poetry, band pages, musings, and travelogues. I’ll be there for all of them, and all of you.
Andrea + Automattic = Awesome
I haven’t really absorbed yet that this is real. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for 10 years, and throughout those years I have struggled with the tension inherent in wanting to be home with our children but also craving the stimulus of work that challenged my mind. Now I will have both. And it doesn’t hurt that I get to work with all these smart, funny people either. I feel like the luckiest woman alive.
I also feel like I want to give an Oscars style thank you speech. So first, I’d like to thank Cheri Lucas Rowlands who Freshly Pressed one of my early blog posts, and in so doing, introduced me to the world of possibilities within the WordPress.com community. Through Cheri’s work I later came to know others on the editorial staff, and I’d like to thank Krista Stevens, Ben Huberman, and Michelle Weber for engaging so much with me and the rest of the WP.com community, for inviting me to guest host a Daily Post writing challenge, and for sending me a care package with a copy of Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants and the Happiness Engineer tee shirt you see in the photo above. Those gifts and all of my interactions with editorial made me say, holy crap, I want to work with this company.
I’d also like to thank Deborah Beckett and Evan Zimmerman who took the time to talk with me at WordCamp Asheville about their experiences as Happiness Engineers with Automattic; all of the hilarious and super smart Automatticians who trained, supported, and helped me throughout my trial; and CEO Matt Mullenweg who I had the pleasure of chatting with as the final step in my hire, and who is kind, respectful, and like, the nicest guy ever.
Finally, I want to thank my family: my husband who took over most of my house-related work during my trial, and our kids who took over the rest of it. This hire is as much due to their hard work as it is to mine. I love you guys 🙂
Last summer, when the kids and I were in Florida for vacation and my husband hadn’t arrived yet, I was PMS-ing. I didn’t realize I was PMS-ing – I hadn’t gone crazy yet. I wasn’t sad for no reason, I wasn’t monstrous to the kids, I didn’t go dark places in my mind or dredge up old sorrows that only surface when I’m premenstrual.
Then I watched Out of Africa. I had never seen Out of Africa. I bawled. I sobbed. Rvers of snot and tears streamed down my face, and as I choked on the emotions pouring out of me, I realized, Holy crap, I am PMS-ing. Hard core.
The next day, I was scoured clean. I didn’t go crazy. I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t monstrous, I didn’t go dark places or dredge up old sorrows, and it occurred to me that the movie had served as a proxy for my own emotions. I was able to cry out all of my hormones. I was able to release without having to enter into my trauma.
It felt wonderful.
I am currently working like I have never worked before. I am in a trial period for a job I really want. I mean, really, really want. My whole family is pitching in to make this happen. My husband has taken over food: planning menus, going to market, putting groceries away, cooking new dinners. The kids have taken over chores: scrubbing bathrooms, mopping floors, changing linens, lugging the vacuum up and down the stairs to de-crumb the carpet.
And me? All I have to do is figure out how to build the internet so I can help other people figure out how to build theirs*. No biggie. All I have to do is excel. No pressure. Every day my mind scales another vertical learning curve. I’ve got lists, and private blogs, and goals, and resources, and 20 tabs open in my browser at any time, and at least a dozen internet tools I’d never heard of until three weeks ago, and I’ve got custom web searches for reaction gifs and thesaurus words, and I’m interacting and writing, and interacting and writing, and interacting and writing all day every day.
And it is thrilling.
And.
It is exhausting.
At the end of each day my mind is gelatinous. My husband asks me questions when he gets home from work and I stare at him vacant eyed. My brain tries to rise to him then sloshes back down into a quivering mound.
At the end of each week, my emotional cache is overflowing, and I leak in inappropriate places. When I had a breakdown in the craft store checkout line last weekend, I knew things had gotten out of hand. The strain of wanting this so badly, and working so hard, and seeing how hard my family was working, it almost broke me. And then I remembered Out of Africa.
I decided to shelve the book I was reading for my Andrea Reads America project – the book I’d been working on for four weeks already and was barely managing to read two pages of each day – and, with a knowing in my heart, I trotted down to the basement book cases, my excitement mounting as I rounded the end of the banister, to the shelf that holds our favorite fantasy books.
I pulled Guy Gavrial Kay’s The Summer Tree off the shelf for the first time in years, and just the cover of it made me close my eyes and smile.
It was everything I needed it to be. I fell into the world in the first paragraph, and I turned pages like I haven’t turned pages in months. Most exciting, though, is that unlike my previous book, which was thinky and political and cerebral, this book makes me feel. The emotions that have been building in me through the want of this job find traction in the character’s stories. I laugh, and my throat chokes, and my heart aches, and I cry. I emote.
And I release. By proxy.
*I’m not really learning how to build the internet, but I am writing from a Jell-O brain. Please forgive my exaggeration poetic license.
We’ve been away from home for four weeks. We camped, we visited family in Georgia and Florida, we vacationed on a Gulf beach, and the kids and I traveled north to Charlottesville to visit my childhood girlfriends and their kids. In the middle of all of this, I interviewed for a dream job, was asked to perform a sample project, and will be continuing the interview process over the next few weeks.
And what have I been thinking about the whole time? Our entire vacation I wondered: How am I going to clean the house if I’m working full-time?
When I first started thinking about re-entering the workforce, I started tracking my hours in my role as stay-at-home mom. I discovered I spend about 15-18 hours a week on writing and my blogs and about 30 hours a week on my job as CEO of the household. If I add 40 hours a week for a job, plus time for sleeping, eating, showering, and relaxing with the family, my brain short circuits and I start doing robot arms: Does not compute! Does not compute!
On vacation, I spent a lot of time strategizing how to make it work. My mental health requires a clean home. In college I could not study until my room was spotless, and I know that in order to focus on my work I will need a tidy, clean workspace. My first thought was to hire a housekeeper, but then my husband said, “Why don’t we pay the kids?”
Uh, duh.
As (I’ve heard) Sheryl Sandberg suggests in her book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, it takes teamwork for women to succeed in the work force. Just as traditionally it took a spouse at home taking care of the household for men to succeed in their careers, it takes a supportive spouse – and family – for women to succeed as well. None of us can do it alone. So after my husband volunteered the kids (and himself) to help take on the jobs that were once mine, I formulated a plan:
Family chore chart: Any of Mom or Dad’s chores marked with an *asterisk can be picked up by kids to earn screen time equivalent to the amount of time it took to do the job.
I first made a list of all the chores:
meal planning, grocery shopping
budget, paying bills, reconciling bank account
clean kitchen (every other week)
vacuum
iron
laundry Monday & Thursday
empty bathroom and kitchen garbage cans
take trash to curb on Thursdays
take recycling to bin periodically
take recycling to curb on Thursdays
sweep and mop
dust
clean mirrors and windows
clean bathrooms
change and launder linens
sweep & weed back deck
I assigned permanent jobs to each of us according to our physical locations (I hope to be working from home so laundry is mine), mental or physical ability (the kids can’t manage the budget, and our vacuum is too heavy for them), and time constraints (garbage duties are quick for the kids when school and sports are in session) and then split the remaining chores among the four of us on a rotating schedule. For example, my chores this week are to change sheets and towels and to sweep the back deck. Next week my chore will be to sweep and mop.
When we talked to the kids about how we’d need help with housework if I re-enter the workforce, and especially when we told them that when I start earning again, they will start earning, too – they will get a bump in allowance – they were all about me getting a job. Surprisingly, they were all about the extra chores, too. As our 10 year-old son and I bobbed in the Gulf of Mexico, talking about financial planning and matching funds if they chose to put money in long-term savings, he asked “Hey Mom? Do you think sometimes we could do extra chores to earn screen time instead of money? If I buy a new game it’s always sad that I don’t have much time to play it.”
Great idea, little dude. Productivity deserves rewards. Besides, that’s one more opportunity to free up time for their Dad and me, and one more chance to teach the kids how to manage a household.
On our drive home from Florida, I scribbled notes in my composition book: how to scrub a toilet, how to sweep, how to mop a floor, how to sort and wash laundry. When we returned home, while sandy shorts and tee-shirts tumbled in the dryer, I wrote a housekeeping manual. I punched holes in the tutorials and put the pages in a leftover school folder. And on the one full day at home between Florida and Charlottesville, I told the kids, “Grab those cleaning caddies from the laundry room and bring them up to our bathroom. With cleaning, we start at the top and move down.”
Our son said, “I’ve got bathrooms the first week, so can you show me how to do that?”
Yes sir.
He read the instructions out loud then started with one bathroom while our daughter started with another. They scrubbed and sprayed and wiped and rinsed while I stood by to answer questions and demonstrate technique. They fought over who got to try laundry first, and took turns with the glass cleaner so they’d both get an opportunity to squirt mirrors and windows. They struggled with carrying the mop bucket up and down the stairs and with keeping the mop over the bucket while they wrung it out, but they did it all, and our house was clean when they finished. They studied the chart, smiling over all the chores they now knew how to do, checking the *asterisked parent chores to see what extra jobs they could do to earn screen time.
The next day, before we left for Charlottesville, when the sun was shining and the kids were bored, our daughter came up to me and asked, “Hey Mom? Can I wash your car?”
And I said, Yes ma’am, you sure can. I’ll be over here at the beer table. Reveling.
The cleaning caddy is one of my happiness containers, especially now that our kids are carrying it.
Butterfly Mind 