Years ago I worked on a team with a guy who lived somewhere in North Texas. The company was a big supporter of telecommuting, and he worked from home. Periodically he would come down to see us face-to-face, but most of the time he dialed in remotely. In the spring you could hear the Mockingbirds in his yard and sometimes his dog. That was just part of the company culture. People worked from home and were sometimes interrupted by chirping or barking or sometimes whining kids.
Today I work at a different company, and I’m the telecommuter. The kid is at college, but there are Mockingbirds and Cardinals and Lesser Goldfinches and two kinds of Wren and (alas) squawking Grackles. And you probably know that there’s a dog.
Most of the day he just sleeps. Guinness is a dog, after all: they sleep. But in the afternoons when dinner time approaches (approach being defined as two hours away), he’ll come in here all wag-tailed and ready-to-go, and if I’m not careful (on the phone) a bark will come at the wrong time.
In this job, at this company, virtually no one telecommutes. My coworkers all think it hilarious when Guinness barks. It doesn’t make much difference what’s being said, when he barks in the middle of a conversation, there’s almost always some way to imagine him offering commentary.
And so they laugh. Every time they laugh. And I wonder if my reputation suffers.
Sometimes I cloister myself in here with the door closed and the electronics driving up the temperature, giving Guinness free reign of the house and the backyard. But most of the time I just don’t worry about it. My reputation is as I do not as my dogs says, and I figure if he barks, well then … it is what it is.
Besides, there are the birds singing outside the patio door on the first day of spring. No amount of laughter can take that away.