Don't you wish you could leave work anytime like American politicians?
Some thoughts on flex-time popped up after seeing a this clip on Videosift with a bunch of American politicians walking out after a grandstanding speech making some spurious claims of support for disgraced Bush administration officials.
What amused me about the video was thinking, well, actually, I can do that too. Not so much defend disgraced officials, but make my own hours.
Of course, I leave for home either because I'm done work for the day or because I can finish it at home if I need to, and it does eventually gets done - on time. That's the nice thing about working "flexibly", from management's point of view - I get stuff done well and on time.
The upside to me is that if we have 30 cm of snow on the way, I can just go home, or stay home for the whole day, spending some time shoveling the snow, and the rest with my laptop getting work done.
I've seen things done the wrong way - at least the way I've read Cordie present her situation at PWC: I would argue that unless you have a pressing need to be on site, it's better to work remotely than to spend 2.5 hours driving to the client site. Of course, that's not always possible - but if the weather's that bad, it's likely that the client you were going to meet with might not be able to come in either. And if they can, you might just be able to talk to them on the phone rather than kill so much time on the road. And if you have to coordinate something with your team, and you're sick or otherwise unable to come into the office, make use of our wondrous tech options. A group chat can get as much work done as a formal sit-down meeting, and you don't have to worry about wasting people's time because they can work on other things while waiting for your review notes to show up.
And from a keeping CAs from having an even worse workaholic reputation point of view, when you do tell people that you took time off when you got sick, stop there rather than pointing out that you ended up spending half your food poisoning day off working nevertheless. As much as I discourage people form working when they're sick, I can nevertheles sympathize with Cordie's need to get her job done on time. Who taught us to be so responsible and hardworking? How evil!