War causing commuter woe

August 10, 2006 - 4:23 PM by Sarah

Sorry, I couldn’t resist the alliteration.

In any corporate environment, it’s important to arrive early, stay late, and show you are part of the team, right? Well, what if the team is living under rocket attack in and near Haifa, and your family has been offered a place to stay out of range of Hezballah? Go to Jerusalem with your wife and kids? Or be a team player with your colleagues who are sticking things out in Haifa?

Blogger “Rock of Galilee,” who normally lives in, yes, the Galilee, is in an ongoing struggle with his workplace to be able to telecommute from Jerusalem:

From August 8:

I came to work today in Haifa (only one siren so far) as part of my come to work once a week program. My boss wanted to discuss the situation with me and told me that he was not happy with the telecommuting and I told him that I also wasn’t happy with the telecommuting.
He offered to rent me an apartment in one of the nearby villages so that it would be easier for me to come to work every day. I even went to look at a couple places in Kiryat Tivon.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but I did my part of looking at it.

The next day:

I sent my boss an email that it wasn’t plausible for us to move back up north right now. We have 2 options, 1 is to fix the telecommuting problem and the 2nd is for me to come in 3 or 4 times a week.

He responded with an email basically saying that I put work on a very low priority and he wasn’t happy about it. The examples he gave made me rather angry. He was on vacation when the war started and missed a lot of the story. I came in to work and requested permission to telecommute. I was given that permission by my other boss. I told him I would come in once a week to take care of things and he agreed. I was in twice before my regular boss came back. He wrote in this email that I only came in after he urged me to, and that everyone else came in and let them know their special situations and they helped them out. They provide a nanny for one family and special transportation for another. He said I didn’t even bother to come in to discuss it.

Tomorrow I’m going back in to discuss this with him. One of the problems is that he doesn’t like the fact that I live an hour away from work (on the border) so he does put some of the blame that I can’t be at work on my shoulders. I’m just so frustrated right now, that it’s hard to get anything done.

And, today’s update:

So my boss and I yelled at each other for about an hour this morning. He apologized for what he wrote and blamed it on the language, because he wrote it in English. I don’t buy it but I do the same thing when I speak in Hebrew, so I accepted it. We ended up agreeing that we disagree with each other in principle.

Starting Monday, I will start coming in to the office 4 times a week and Tuesdays I will work from Jerusalem. They won’t give me a car because they think the bus is fine.

I’m not happy, but they’re not happy either and that makes it even.

I’m not looking for a new job yet, mostly because I like this company, and that’s what counts.

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