They Think I'm Retired

THE VIEW · BY MICHAEL SIERVO

The Colleague Under the Desk

He's under there right now. Head down, either fully asleep or just pleased to be near me. He isn't saying which. Six years old, a ball of fur, part husky and part pomeranian, which means he took the coat from one side and the personality from the other and has never been quiet about either.

Across the room are Maddy and Miley. Four months old, two Yorkies. They arrived because I came home from the Philippines to find my wife had decided, in my absence, that this house needed more animals. There was no vote. There is never a vote.

And at the kitchen table, the fourth member of the team, watching my neighbour Chris fix his Corvette across the street.

The Suit Era

For years I did this differently. Wake up. Suit. Tie. Brew the coffee. Grab the briefcase. Leave. There was a downtown office at the end of that sequence, and the sequence itself was the proof.

I still do all of it. The waking, the coffee, the sitting down to work. What changed is the costume, now a hoodie and a pair of fuzzy slippers, and the view, which used to be a tower and is now Chris and that Corvette, a project underway as long as I have lived here with no sign of concluding.

Coco has drawn the obvious conclusion. The man is home. The man is home every day. The man wears what he wore to bed. The man is, quite clearly, retired.

Your Dogs Think You're Retired Too

Whether you're in a condo in Makati or a house in Iloilo with a yard, your dog thinks you've retired. Your dog has believed this for two years and has told the other animals.

In my house it's three dogs. In yours it might be a cat, something with feathers, a pig, your lola's chickens conducting their business outside the window while you're on a call with a client in Denver who has no idea. What matters is that a creature in your house watches you sit down every morning in clothes no employed person would be seen in, and has formed a private theory about your career.

They see you every day. That's more than your clients do. More than most of your friends manage. Which, taken seriously, makes them your coworkers.

The Part Underneath the Joke

Some days these dogs are the only company I have. Not the main company. The only.

Nobody mentions this when they sell you the geographically free life, but you can go from morning to mid-afternoon without hearing a voice that isn't coming through a speaker, and some days you're not certain you've used your own. The dogs don't fix that. Nothing with fur fixes that, and anyone in the deep end should go find some humans and mean it. But they notice you. There is a difference between an empty room and a room where something is glad you're in it, and on the long days that difference is not small. ** So Give Them a Job**

If they're coworkers, they need jobs. And since Coco is convinced I've retired, the only responsible thing is to prove him wrong by putting him to work.

Every few hours, he takes me outside. I've written that in the right order. He is not going to lie under that desk for nine hours while I pretend a fourth coffee is a substitute for daylight, so at some point he stands, arrives at my knee, and makes his case. I go. He is right, and I have never once come back from that walk in a worse mood.

Maddy and Miley run a different portfolio. Their job is to be picked up at the precise moment the work stops making sense, which they identify with an accuracy I have stopped interrogating. Ten minutes with two Yorkies and the problem I'd ground at for an hour turns out to have been a problem about me. The Boundary You Couldn't Set Yourself Let me tell you about the part that matters, under the fur.

You know the boundaries you're supposed to keep. Take breaks. Get outside. Stop at a reasonable hour. You know every one and you're keeping none, because a boundary you set for yourself is one you can quietly renegotiate, and you always win that negotiation.

You cannot negotiate with a dog.

Coco does not care about your deadline. He holds no opinion on the client, has no concept of a quarterly target, and has no patience left for "just five more minutes," which he has heard before and correctly filed as a lie. The walk happens at three because the walk happens at three. He enforced a boundary I could not enforce on myself across twenty years of trying, and he did it without a single productivity system, because he refuses to accept the premise.

That's not a perk of working from home. That's the infrastructure.

They Think I'm Retired So if something alive shares your house, stop filing it under distraction and start filing it under operations. Walk the dog. Feed the pig. Say good morning to the chickens. Put a hand on the carabao. Whatever's out there has a purpose, so give it one, and let it give you the thing no downtown office ever offered anybody: a room where somebody is uncomplicatedly glad you showed up.

Coco thinks I'm retired.

Some afternoons, out on the road at three o'clock with a dog who has never heard of a quarterly target, watching Chris lose another round to that Corvette, I have a very hard time proving him wrong. * Michael is the Founder of Blvd Magazine, a former executive that left the fancy office and watercooler chats to enjoy co-workers to don’t gossip, walk around naked and are always happy to see me despite his progress reports being late.*