I really detest that question. Why do we care? Does it really matter what anybody does for a living?
When that question comes from your young child, it does matter…to them.
I don’t often write about personal things but this is too good not to share. First, I have two children, six and four years old. Yesterday, my oldest son asked me,
“TaTa, what do you do for work?”
(Side note: My kids both call me ‘Tata’ despite being an English-speaking Canadian family. It means ‘father’ or ‘dad’ in many languages and their first daycare was in Toronto run by a lovely Serbian woman.)
My initial reaction was to go into the tedious loquacity I spiel out whenever I get that question – people are often intrigued by those of us fortunate enough to work from home. I stopped. Thought about it for a few seconds and turned it back to him.
“What do you think I do for work?”
He paused for a moment.
“Well, I know you work on your computer.”
I encouraged him to go on.
“And you work in your office downstairs. You write stuff on your computer and you are on your phone a lot.”
“Am I a lawyer?”
“No.”
“A carpenter?”
“No, but you do build stuff.”
“A doctor?”
“No.”
“Well, what do I do?”
He looked me dead in the eye and said, “You help run the internet. More specifically, you help run the new top-level domain extension for .blog, launched in 2016 and governed by a set of rules and regulations under the watchful eye of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers!”
Of course, he didn’t say that! He is only six…though that would have been amazing.
What he actually said was, “it doesn’t matter what you do for work as long as you are my Tata. I think I’ll just tell my class that!”
I smiled, soaking it all in, shook my head ‘no’ and went into my spiel.
Don Ruiz 