#SMOOZE FLASH HOW TO#

My kitchen is my office and I expect to conduct business there, just as when I'm in my husband's office, I wouldn't expect him to let the phone ring off the hook while he pays sole attention to me. I've noticed that if my husband gets a call from work at night, the entire household must hold its breath while he takes care of it. But we should not feel like criminals if the phone rings in the late afternoon or evening and it's a friend who needs to talk about mother business. It is, after all, rude to talk on the phone when another person is in the room who can't be part of the conversation.ДЄlso, we are happy to see our kids and husbands we miss them during the day. I'm not saying we should hang on the phone after the kids come home from school or the husband gets home from the office. How else do you get to know someone? Here's what I think: If women didn't schmooze on the phone, family life as we know it would not exist. My friends are mothers who are also: social workers, nutritionists, lawyers, real estate agents, teachers, doctors, therapists, journalists, you name it. The amount we learn from one another is inestimable and we all bring different skills to our jobs. What do we talk about? We mostly talk about business, every imaginable aspect of the business of raising children and the conduct of family life and running a home. We also can, of course, visit one another's 'offices,' but that's hard to arrange and it's much faster and more efficient to talk on the phone. In connection with that work, we communicate on the phone. Not, unfortunately, on the same site, but every bit as much together. The fact is, my home is my office, every bit as much as my old office was, and my fellow mothers are my colleagues. Or do they? I tried to talk to a surgeon friend about this, but didn't get much of a response, or if I did, I had trouble understanding what he said. Open heart surgeons probably don't schmooze that much, or at least not while they're in the OR.

Now I agree there's more schmoozing in some jobs than there is in others.

What's the deal, that it's okay to talk on the phone as long as someone is paying you to do it? In fact, when I really started thinking back on my office days, I realized that an actually ENORMOUS part of the day was spent in one kind of schmoozing or another: between getting coffee, schmoozing, doing a bit of work, schmoozing some more, lunch, more schmoozing and meetings, I would estimate that we actually 'worked' a total of three hours a day. Then I flash back to the old days, when I worked in an office chained to a desk and a computer for pay and I realized that a huge chunk of my time was spent on the phone, sometimes on serious business but other times doing the schmoozing that's an important part of doing business, forming the relationships that are so important in the office world. If women who work as full-time mothers are on the phone, then they're not cooking, or cleaning, or running errands, or shuttling their kids back and forth, or volunteering in their school classrooms, so they must be goofing off, right? After all, if people are really working, they're not on the phone, are they? Maybe, I think, women feel, or are made to feel, that when they're on the phone, they're wasting time, or taking time away from something more important. Gotta go!' And I'm left to wonder, why is it that when women talk on the phone to each other, especially women who work at home raising and keeping a family, they feel as if they're doing something wrong?

#SMOOZE FLASH HOW TO#

It happens all too often: I'm talking to a friend on the phone, let's say about who's going to bring the soccer snack, the latest media nutrition crisis and what we should do about it or how to organize a community protest or if she had a Halloween costume party for grown-ups would anybody actually come, and my friend suddenly says, 'Oops, gotta go, my husband just pulled up,' or 'Oh!,' in a false-cheery tone of voice, because he is now standing in the kitchen, glaring, 'Jack just walked in! I can't wait to hear how his meeting with Amalgamated Associates went.

Smooze flash