FAQ - Take Our Grown Daughters & Sons To Work Day

Introduction

With the COVID-19 pandemic finally easing up, companies are bringing employees back into the office and gradually resuming business as usual. An annual event that was just gaining momentum before shelter-in-place is finally back, and this year is going to be better than ever!

What is Take Our Grown Daughters & Sons To Work Day?

Take Our Grown Daughters & Sons To Work Day (TOGDSTWD) is an annual event that gives grown daughters and sons, who are technically adults but still live with their parents, a glimpse into the “grown-up” world. Through this hands-on, immersive experience, these young adults can begin to imagine a life in which they, too, would hold down a steady 9-to-5 salary-type job, and actually move out and live on their own. A parent takes his or her grown offspring in to the office or other place of employment and allows them to “shadow” actual employees as they go about their traditional working roles. In addition, numerous fun activities are hosted, depending on what resources a company has to devote to the event.

When is TOGDSTWD?

This year’s event occurs on Thursday, April 28—the same as the traditional Take Our Daughters & Sons To Work Day. This way, adult offspring can see actual children attending as well, and perhaps feel the slight stirrings of embarrassment that they’re really in the same boat, despite no longer being students.

How does Take Our Grown Daughters & Sons To Work Day create a fairer, more equitable world?

This annual event helps inspire our adult offspring to “launch”—i.e., take charge of their lives and eventually become a nation of homeowners and economy-boosters, instead of malingering with gig-economy nowhere jobs while their degrees get stale. Parents: imagine a world where nobody borrows your car all the time and returns it with an empty gas tank!

Can everybody participate?

Parents will need to check with their employers about whether their offspring can participate. If you work for the CIA, or in a surgical operating room, or as an Air Force pilot, it may be difficult to accommodate your son or daughter. On the other hand, for positions in manufacturing or mining, it can be easier to participate than with traditional Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, because no child labor laws apply!

I work from home. Can I still take part?

Yes, though it will be trickier. See what kind of support is in place now that teleworking is so widespread. Your toughest job will be to keep your adult child from getting drawn in by all the distractions in your home—though frankly, that’s a big part of your own job too, is it not? Meanwhile, TOGDSTWD is a great chance to emphasize to your offspring that just because they’ve seen you fall asleep at your desk watching webinars, they can’t expect to get away with that … after all, it took you years to get where you are.

I am coordinating this event for my company. Can you suggest some fun activities?

Yes! Below are a variety of ideas for making this day a big hit with parents and their adult children alike.

Career Exploration Panel – Company employees host a panel on how to break into the adult work world. The twist is, all panelists are people who got a slow start, spending years as waiters or baristas before getting their acts together. They will describe how they spun their limited work experience into a workable résumé and talk track, and managed to insinuate themselves into corporate America. What better way to give hope to the “Lost Generation 2.0!”

Career-Themed Coloring Books – At first your adult child may feel insulted, but this isn’t like the coloring they did in preschool, where they were encouraged to explore their artistic side by going outside the lines. This exercise is all about staying within the lines, to explore what it’s like to simply do something the way “the man” says. This is a fun way to build a skill that is so important for these young college grads.

“Kids” Cook-Off – This is a great one if your offices have a kitchen or cafeteria. In this twist on the original child-oriented concept (where parents cook, kids vote, and everyone grabs a fork), it’s the adult children who cook—and actual meals, not just Top Ramen and box mac ‘n’ cheese. Parents vote on what turned out best, and the top prize is getting to eat that (as opposed to the loss-leader entrees). Best of all, the young adults do all the cleanup! This is to teach these not-quite-fledged offspring that there’s more to daily sustenance than Mom’s home cooking and Uber Eats.

Have Your Offspring Interview You – Chances are your adult child has already been through plenty of mock interviews (which obviously didn’t help). But this time, he or she interviews you, the parent/breadwinner. It’s been so long since you were actually interviewed, you might find this a challenge ... especially with the tough questions your kid will throw at you. This activity is all about parents building empathy for their adult children’s difficult journey.

Record-a-Video Contest – This is a simple concept: throughout the event, parents are challenged to make videos of the activities, and at the end of the day they submit them to a panel of judges. There will be prizes for both Best Video and Most Videos. The offspring, meanwhile, must surrender their phones upon arrival at the event. This way, the tables are turned and the adult children can witness how annoying it is for somebody else to be buried in their phone instead of paying attention.

Quiz: What Do Your Parents Do for a Living? – This one is guaranteed to be a hoot. As many times as you’ve explained your career to your kid, it’ll become obvious they weren’t paying attention, and their guesses can be comically inane. Here are some surprising answers from last year’s event:

• “You, um, take a lot of calls…”
• “You work on that … that application thingie, that system … whatever the thing is that gives people internet.”
• “It’s either marketing, or program manager. Maybe both?”
• “You coordinate … stuff.”
• “Something with databases, CCRs or CRMs or something? Basically tracking things in some way?”
• “Some kind of techie thing, involving meetings where people try to sound smart to themselves.”

Business Email Workshop – Toward the end of TOGDSTWD, the adult sons and daughters will each write an email to the organizers describing their experience. Then they’ll work with their parents to polish the email until it’s “business grade.” This means turning phrases into complete sentences, adding capitalization, and most of all changing the tone from offhand and dismissive (e.g., “to2ly lame, waste of time”) to earnest and professional (e.g., “I felt the day was extremely useful in terms of helping me discover the vast possibilities available to me to have a meaningful career that helps me grow personally, while building a better future for everyone”).

Is there an Excused Absence form I can download to get my adult child out of his shift at the coffee shop?

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to excuse an adult from a service sector job as to excuse a child from school. After all, we’re trying to poach from these businesses’ already diminishing workforce. At least gig workers will have no good excuse to skip the event!

The event website merchandise catalog offers a “Hydration Water Bottle.” Is this the same thing as a water bottle?

We really struggled with this, actually. It’s not completely correct to call it a water bottle, because you could put just about any beverage in it. On the other hand, “hydration bottle” just sounds weird. So we went with Hydration Water Bottle. Note that the contents of the bottle could be hot, so be careful.

Can I donate money to the Take Our Grown Daughters & Sons To Work Foundation?

Absolutely, donations are always welcome and in fact are what make this program go! Unfortunately, we are not able to accept checks, credit cards, PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle at this time. Program liaisons are available to collect cash contributions and provide receipts. Please note that docents never have more than $200 on their persons to make change.

Is this program a great way to make a change?

Please see above.

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From the Archives - Seeking Office Work, or “I Played Myself”

Introduction

Back in college, I wrenched at bike shops to support myself. When I transferred from UCSB to Berkeley, I was feeling all fancy and thought maybe I could trade in my shop apron for a nice button-down shirt and make lots more money working in nice clean offices, doing word processing and database stuff (which required skills that, back then, were somewhat rare). This essay, from my archives, describes my job hunt, with copious asides about language skills and my hapless efforts to pick up chicks.

(Postscript: when I failed to find office work, I went right back to working at a bike shop. It was my destiny.)

Language Arts Field Study - August 1, 1990

It’s weird: I’m getting a degree in English, but I’m not learning very much about how language actually works. So I’ve been trying to learn how to communicate out “in the field”—i.e., in the real world. If I manage to edify myself, maybe I’ll try to figure out how to get some college credit for my efforts.

At the Manpower Temporary Service where I sought work, they spoke in special “temp” clichés. One such cliché is “temp” itself, which means “a person employed by a temporary service” who earns money by “temping.” Manpower employs entire sentences that are themselves clichés. “What is your biggest interpersonal strength?” was a rote question, read right off the intake form by the Manpower woman. Though I recognized this as a stock question, I felt like putting them on the spot for a change, so I said, “I’m not sure I understand.”

The woman rattled off a list of stock responses that were also clichés which I didn’t understand, so I was forced to reply in simple English: “I work well with people who are stressed out. At least, I don’t tend to make them angrier.” She searched her mental cliché bank and said, “Oh, ‘communication.’” Just like that, she listed “communication” as my greatest strength. I don’t think that’s entirely accurate. I sometimes don’t communicate very well at all. The problem is mechanical. When I’m under stress, sometimes my vocal chords seem to dry up completely and are replaced by a flute reed, so my voice comes out pathetic and whistling and ineffectual. So, that bit I said earlier about working well with stressed-out people? That doesn’t include myself. So it’s probably a completely false claim, come to think of it.

Things went a bit better at the second agency I went to, Kelly Services. Yes, it’s Kelly as in “Kelly girl.” I’m aware that Kelly tends to prefer girls, but at least I have a girl’s name. Plus, I run, throw, and type like a girl. My brother says I even shoot baskets like a girl, with one leg swinging back from the knee, girlishly. I don’t really care who compares me to a girl as long as I start making the big bucks.

Kelly interviewed me more casually, without obviously using a preprinted list of questions. The dialogue felt more social and didn’t involve as many clichés—or did I just not notice them because I had hit my stride and was slinging them expertly myself? No matter … I was much less flummoxed than at Manpower. Who knows, maybe I was just less intimidated, because I didn’t have big, bold notions like “Man” and “Power” hovering around me. Just “Kelly,” which come to think of it can be a boy’s name, too.

The only problem is, Kelly Services requires its employees to work for 40 hours before getting free training. Which is, of course, a catch-22. After all, how can they place me in an office when I haven’t been trained? I guess I could start with something really menial, like filing. But that didn’t work out so well with Manpower. The first would-be gig Manpower offered me was “collating data.” I didn’t know what this meant, but it sounded high-tech and complicated. I tried to stall for time, on the phone with the Manpower recruiter, while I looked up “collate” in the dictionary. I couldn’t find it in time (I thought its spelling began C-O-A-L) so I had to turn down the gig. I only figured out that it meant basic filing after it was too late to accept the assignment.

Fortunately, when I interviewed at Kelly I came equipped with plenty of word processing experience, having used WordStar 3.3 for years. This software wasn’t listed on the application form, though, so I had to check the box next to WordStar 5.5. I was thinking, like, how different could they be? The answer is: very. I had to take a test on 5.5, complete with decimal tabulations, funky temporary margins, and other jumps through the proverbial hoop. I was forced to completely wing it, and hoped that the time I wasted scratching my head would be offset by my blazing typing speed.

I got the results back and only qualified for a Category IV ranking, which seemed like a disaster. After all, my only context for “Category IV” was Bikespeak. In bike racing circles, a Category IV is the scum, the newcomer, the very bottom of the barrel. But it turns out that in Tempspeak, the ranking is the other way around: Category IV is the highest ranking. The woman who interviewed me seemed impressed and waived the 40‑hour work requirement for free training, so today I went in for my first free training session, so I could learn a word processing program that offices actually use.

In my personal definition, “knowing a word processing program” means having so much experience with it that even the most complex operation is as automatic as the beating of my heart. With this in mind, I figured training in industry-leading WordPerfect would take a really long time, as in a week or two. I figured that winging it with WordStar 5.5 was only a temporary expedient, a computer one‑night‑stand, useful only for convincing the Kelly folks that I’d processed words before. But I was wrong: the standards that Kelly Services uses (and hence, their customers as well) are much more liberal. Apparently no office ever expects a temp to know anything, and trumped-up résumés are expected. And Kelly was all about trumping up my résumé.

What the hell am I talking about? Am I communicating this to you effectively? What is “this”? Okay, here’s what I’m getting at: in about an hour I completed the entire battery of WordPerfect training, and tested at Category IV with what Theresa, my supervisor, said was quite possibly the highest score she’d ever seen. She said only one other person she’s ever tested made Category IV. I left the office totally pumped. Do you know this word “pumped”? I never heard it used in Colorado, so I will assume it’s Californiaspeak. It means about the same thing as “stoked.” I figured with that rare Cat IV rating I would be pulling in big bucks in no time, just by waiting near the phone for assignment after plush, indoor, air-conditioned assignment.

I strode out to my parked bicycle, kind of floating above the sidewalk, soaring on a thermal of pure optimism, thinking divine thoughts like, “Dana Albert. Category IV. Yeah. That kind of temp.” In fact, I even did a fist-pump. O, what a rarified form of communication this is. It doesn’t even require a mouth: it’s non-verbal. I learned it only recently. Here’s what you do. Simply extend your forearm, palm up and parallel to the ground, with your bicep roughly 45 degrees to the forearm. Then make a fist and draw it straight back (keeping the forearm parallel to the ground) until it slides in right next to your belly (within a plane perpendicular to that of your chest, of course). The fist‑pump, I’ve learned, used to be accompanied by either silence or the somewhat stupid‑sounding exclamation “Boom, baby!” But now I sometimes do it with a quiet “Eeeyyyyeeessss!” This is kind of an elongated “yes.” It’s stretched out in the way that holy rollers can drag three syllables out of “Jesus” (i.e., “Juh-HEEE-zuss!”).

I rode home, parked my bike, plopped down in a chair, and waited for the phone to ring. This is the natural next step in the temporary service employment process. But the phone didn’t ring. It didn’t ring all afternoon, and it still didn’t ring the whole next day, or the day after that. This temp thing was supposed to be more lucrative than fixing bikes, but of course that’s only when on-the-clock, which I had yet to be. I sat around my apartment losing money for about a week before starting to worry that “Cat IV” doesn’t actually mean anything. It began to dawn on me that perhaps the recruiter had been exaggerating about my performance on the word processing test. I realized, with a pang, that she’d been lying through her teeth about the uniqueness of my WordPerfect abilities. And why would she do this? To boost my confidence, of course, so that in my first ten minutes at my first assignment I wouldn’t disgrace myself, and my temp agency, with the flute-reed-voice.

Finally I got a gig, but it wasn’t based on my WordPerfect abilities. It was a half-day stint as a receptionist in the University of California Office of the President in downtown Oakland. I was coached quickly in Receptionistspeak, which involves smoothly and glibly lying through your teeth. “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, but Bill has just stepped out of his office for a moment. Can I take a message and have him get back to you?” (Bill has told you in advance, even making a throat-cutting gesture for emphasis, not to put Mr. Smith through, and will under no circumstances get back to Mr. Smith, ever.)

I’m still somewhat weak with this language, because the incredibly long silent spells inherent in the job turned my vocal chords to mush and warped my sense of time. Perhaps the lack of phone interactions made me a bit crazy, all that dead silence, so I was trying to wring as much out of the rare call as I could. I haven’t fully grasped my own motives, but suffice to say my speech during these calls dribbled quietly and lackadaisically out of my mouth. With a bit of the right twang I reckon I could have even passed for a Southerner. This slow speech had a profoundly unsettling effect on the frenzied caller, who invariably had a deadline which he’d never make if enough people like me lacked his swift pace.

Fortunately, of the five floors of the Kaiser Building that the University of California occupies, my floor was the quietest so I spent most of my short receptionist career just sitting at the hugest desk you’ve ever seen, staring blankly down the hallway into which the elevators spill, listening to the only noise perceptible to me, which was a fan or humidifier or something. My responses became so dulled that whenever somebody called or asked me something, I played myself.

The expression “I played myself” is another one I never heard in Colorado, so I’ll chalk it up as more Californiaspeak. It means, near as I can figure, “I acted in such a manner as to fail in achieving my goal, and in such dramatic fashion as to rob myself of most of my self‑esteem, which of course will increase my chances of repeating this failure.” The term is most frequently used to describe errors made with a member of the opposite sex, generally resulting in being ignored or even told off (that is, being “shut down”) by said member of the opposite sex.

Notably, the emphasis with the term “I played myself” is on the fact that the person who played himself is totally at fault. In contrast, if a girl shut you down for no good reason while you were behaving perfectly, of course you didn’t play yourself. To describe this latter situation, you would use the Spanish idiomatic expression, “Dio me calabazas.” I pronounce this, for better or for worse, “Da meh caleh-BASS-us” because that’s how it’s pronounced by my gringo friends, who turned me on to the phrase. Its literal translation into English is “she gave me pumpkins” but its meaning is that which I have described above. Perhaps this is because pumpkins are almost worthless, making the statement roughly equivalent to “She gave me nothing in return for all the goodness I showed to her.”

The beauty of this expression is that its all‑too‑frequent use has resulted in its literal English translation being completely acceptable. For example, a friend will ask, “What happened to Connie?” and I’ll answer, “Aw, she gave me pumpkins.” (In fact, there is no woman named Connie. In the extremely specific and localized dialect of my apartment, “Connie” means “any girl on whom you once had designs.” This comes from a friend of ours who became infatuated with a girl over the course of a night out with a group of friends, and—unable to remember her name but thinking it might be Connie—called her this, but rolling the “C” into a kind of gravel-y “H” in the hopes that if he’d guessed wrong she’d simply think he was calling her “honey” and not be offended. Her name was, like, Monica, and she was plenty offended. But I digress.)

This “pumpkins” expression has proved extremely concise. My roommate was all pumped for a big date with the fly betty of his dreams, but it didn’t go well. When I got home, ready to ask all kinds of prying questions that would elicit painful answers, he stopped me short by greeting me with, “Dude, welcome to the 62nd Street pumpkin patch!” (Maybe I’ll ask somebody out in late October, so when she shines me I can tell Brett, “Dude, I met the great pumpkin!”)

Brevity is especially helpful—a lifesaver in fact—in the realm of dating because it helps the jilted would-be boyfriend abbreviate the long, boring story, larded with incessant whining, that would normally alienate his otherwise steadfast guy friends. If he truly believes he had a shot but blew it by being arrogant, or timid, or unexpectedly deploying flute-reed-voice, he can assign the blame to himself with a brief phrase—“I played myself”—in lieu of endless self-abnegating blather.

As potent as these crafty new phrases can be, sometimes utter silence is altogether better. Girls should consider this the next time they utter that most base and cruel lie, “I’ll call you.” This underhanded rebuke is absolutely never true, for the simple reason that even in this enlightened age, girls aren’t supposed to call guys. The guy is supposed to call, and call again, and never lose hope. If the girl calls, she insults herself. Why, I’d bet that the chances of a girl actually calling you are even lower than the chances of a temp agency calling you. The actual meaning of “I’ll call you,” when uttered by a female of the opposite sex, is “I will not call you.” The subtext is, “Don’t bother calling me. You have insulted and disgraced me with your [lack of confidence] [lack of good looks] [lack of cool clothes] [flute-reed-voice].”

So, yeah, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my field study of how language is actually used, it’s this: if a temp agency says “I’ll call you,” it’s best to head straight to a bike shop and ask, “Are you hiring?” And if a fly girl ever says, “I’ll call you,” it’s best to go straight home and tell your roommate, “Dio me calabazas.”

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