Take Your Child to Work Day

When I was a kid (long ago and far away) this was still called Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Apparently all 7^th grade English teachers united to boycott the horrible day when their classroom was overrun with the stink of I-shower-at-night pre-pubescent boys. At any rate, this day is now extended to children of both sexes.

On my very late way into work this morning (I’m experimenting with the limits of what exactly fashionably late really is) I witnessed these poor children cordoned off in a far section of the cafeteria watching a Power Point presentation, presumably about what their parents do all day. Power Point? For a group off 11 year-olds? SERIOUSLY?

Those poor kids looked like they’d like nothing more than to actually be in math class at that very moment. If you ask me, this is just asking for these children to stay in school indefinitely, draining their parents’ retirement funds for tuition for useless liberal arts degree after useless liberal arts degree…

When I was a kid, Take Your Daughter to Work Day was something to look forward to, not something to dread. We always went with our Dad, because our Mom was a teacher, and going to school on a day we had off from it was nothing to get excited about.

Our day usually started off with a doughnut breakfast (Score!) while we dead-headed on the train down to the city. In the morning we’d play on Dad’s computer with a coloring program he’d had installed especially for us, and get to meet all the people he called, “Bigot,” “Moron,” and “BOOBra,” (the very chesty secretary named Barbara) at the dinner table every night. Lunch would be McDonalds (yet another score, Mom never let us have fast food) followed by a very fun and fascinating tour of Grand Central Terminal (organized presumably so that the parents could actually accomplish some work while we were there) whose facts I can still spout even 15 years later. (Did you know sound is carried along an archway? You talk into one side of it and someone listening at the other side will hear you. Amazing.) At the end of the day we’d dead-head back home on the train, and have NO homework!

I bet nowadays if kids miss school for Take Your Child to Work Day they have to write a report or something to present to their class when they come back. It’s total crap. I think when I have kids Take Your Child to Work Day will consist of shopping, soap operas and nap time. And now I want a doughnut…