How Hard Is This?
My son Mayo’s daycare provider regularly texts parents, sometimes individually and sometimes collectively. She may send photos of their children, share an anecdote, or update folks on delays or closings due to snow.
Wait… wait… did I say parents? I misspoke. She texts the moms all those things. And despite me having asked politely on two separate occasions, I have only received a small handful of the texts. I remain left off the whole-group distribution list and do not get most of the individual parent updates. This is frustrating for a number of reasons, chiefly:
1.) I’m actually, ya know, interested in my son’s life and would like to know what he’s doing all day.
2.) I do most of the pick ups and drop offs. As such, information related to openings and closings is kind of important for me to have and having to rely on Zazzy to forward all the texts seems unnecessary.
3.) It’s at least a little insulting that her mindset with regards to parenting and gender roles seems so antiquated.
4.) I have essentially the same job as her! So I know exactly how much — or, really, how little — effort it takes to make such a shift… both in terms of the logistics of updating a distribution list AND in altering one’s framework.
Two questions for the hive-mind…
1.) How do I address this without getting all ranty/preachy?
2.) Have you ever had to interact with someone who did essentially the same job as you and who acted as if a part of it nigh impossible yet you knew the opposite to be true? If so, how did you handle it?
I feel your pain, my brother.Report
You could tell her that Zazzy got a new phone number.Report
All the time, dude. Lawyers break the rules, miss deadlines, file things late, on and on. Sometimes I complain about it to the judge. Does me little good. I’ve learned to say “I’ll let it slide as a courtesy, but you owe me a courtesy back,” and sometimes I even get courtesies reciprocated.
Not often, though; I try hard to not need them and there’s a sub-species of attorney who will often refuse to return courtesies, which inevitably eventually bites them in the ass.
When that happens, I enjoy the Schadenfreude.Report
Speak it brother. I had a lawyer do a motion to exclude evidence shortly before a hearing after sitting on the evidence for two and half years.Report
I am sure that is frustrating, @burt-likko and @leeesq . But I’m thinking more about people we interact with when the relationship is reversed. I work with plenty of barely competent people. It comes with the territory. But to interact with someone who does the same job as you in their professional capacity and with you as the “client”.
Sometimes, when we are the professional, we get complaints and think, “This person has no idea how hard what they are asking is.” But sometimes, the person knows exactly how hard — or how easy — something is because they do the exact same thing for a living. Imagine seeking the services of a lawyer and asking her to communicate via email only to be told, “It is inappropriate for me to do so ethically.” You’d want to yell at her, wouldn’t you? Because you know that is just a bunch of claptrap.Report
Kazzy,
Why don’t you throw out “mom privilege” or “cis hetero gender bias” when you next see her. That ought to get her attention.
As to your second question, I once called Verizon about incorrect taxes being applied to my bill. When they explained that they couldn’t retroactively fix the taxes and give me a credit, I called BS and explained how to do it, including “yes, you’ll have to do this by hand or on a spreadsheet”. They didn’t want to to do it and just gave me the credit amount I ROMed rather than doing the math…’cause is SOOOO hard.Report
I worked customer support for AT&T years ago. I honestly couldn’t do something as basic as use a spreadsheet to calculate how much we had overcharged someone, because IT had put considerable effort into making sure our computers could do only the thing management thought were in the purview of our jobs. The Internet filter also fairly often prevented me getting to things like the user manuals for phones we sold.
In at least one case I ended up spending the better part of an hour with notepad.exe and calc.exe, for something that would have taken maybe two minutes with access to even a rudimentary spreadsheet.Report
1) you basically have to keep asking. i now finally get most of the updates i’m supposed to get. not all of them, because frankly they’re awful at all of the backend stuff. (we often get invoiced two or three times for the same bill, two or three days apart.) can’t wait to hit public school in the fall…i think? i do like the new teacher, though, and she actually includes me in messaging.
honestly, and i’m not trying to sound defeatist, but there will always be the presumption that penis = inattentive at best, even from most teachers. if you go up the food chain to some high end private daycare scenario maybe that changes? dunno. there’s no way to insist upon it without causing mass butthurt and so it’s best to sit on your frustrations and try to gently but consistently remind them that you’ve been involved in his life well beyond the initial 7 minutes in heaven.
2) you have to make a choice. how long do you have to deal with these chucklenuts and what’s the benefit of offering suggestions/corrections versus just dealing with the not being great at it? what do you get out of it versus what will it cost you? also remember that some people really enjoy griping about nominal things (there’s a whole body of work in sociolinguistics about how cultures complain socially) as a way of demonstrating and congealing social networks. complaints beget sympathy and a blah blah blah.Report
and right on cue, a four part email exchange. teacher 1 is the old teacher, teacher 2 is the new one (they’re both the same age, however). teacher 1 copies everyone but me on the email; teacher two copies me in on her responses to everyone. they’re all responding to the same emails so teacher 1 is either re-entering emails by hand or just stripping me out because penises.Report
@dhex
What is particularly perplexing is that this woman knows I do essentially the same job as her. We have regular conversations about our shared profession. She knows I run point on my son’s speech and OT services. She just has an internalized muscle memory that seems to say, “Vaginas only on this email chain.”
I make a point to ask parents at the start of the year who the primary point of contact should be. Who should be on what emails. Not only is it the decent thing to do, but it helps me out! If she doesn’t text me about a change of arrival procedures and Zazzy doesn’t forward the message on to me, she has to deal with me trying to drop off 2 hours early. That is disadvantageous for her!Report
“…helps *her* out.”Report
Kazzy,
this seems like a classic case of “Squeak Louder.”
In this case, that means sitting there and not moving until she fixes the e-mail.
Use histrionics as a last resort, because while effective, they will cost you dignity.Report
Have you tried bluntly telling her what you said here (calmly)? “This bothers me for logistical reasons, but it also upsets me because it feels gender-based and makes me feel like you see fathers as less important than mothers”. And if she claims it’s difficult, “Come on, we both know that isn’t true.” (I sometimes suffer from excessive benefit-of-the-doubt giving, but I’ve come to realize that a lot of headaches can be avoided by saying what I’m thinking, as long as it’s not in the heat of anger or irritation.)
Additionally, every time she sends something to Zazzy, have Zazzy respond, “Please send this to Kazzy. He is our POC for daycare issues.” If nothing else, maybe she’ll get sick of Zazzy’s replies.Report
Well if I lived near you I could storm in with my fiery sword of gender rage.
Not sure if it would help but it would be colorful.
I’d try, “I can’t help notice how I’m excluded and this really bothers me. It’s unfair and I insist that you include me.” If she does not, start talking to the other parents.Report
With my former software geek hat on, I remark that I have always found it easier to, with spousal permission, cobble together some piece of software to extract copies of stuff as it becomes available on the spouse’s account, than to convince people that they should send stuff to me.Report