Welcome to your future. Yes, it's a cubicle.

So today was take your snot nosed brat…I mean take your child to work day. This day always poses a challenge to me as I am significantly lacking in the snot nosed brat department. Well, I am a brat and depending on how my allergies are that day the other portion of that phrase might be applicable but as someone without kids this day always makes me feel weird at the office. It is like I am supposed to go out and rent a family for the occasion. Otherwise I feel as though I am being left out.

This whole take your child to work movement is a rather recent phenomenon starting while I’ve actually been working. I never went with my dad to work to see what his day as an architect was like. To be honest, even when I graduated college I wasn’t entirely sure what working a real job was like. I could never quite understand how you were given assignments or how you ever knew what to do. Now with twelve years of work experience (and a two year hiatus for grad school) I can confidently say that I still have no clue what working a real job is supposed to be like. I still feel like I’m doing it wrong and that one day someone is going to ask me where the electro spanner that all employees are given on their third day is.

So I guess it is a good thing that we show kids what work in the real world is actually like so that they can enter an office without it being a blank space. I can’t blame any parent for taking time out to be with their kid either (though why the purpose is to take them out of school in the process is a little bit counter intuitive). My big issue is that I can’t understand why we want to introduce our children to the mindless drudgery that is our daily life in the office any earlier than we have to.

Now don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy my job. I get to talk about dollars and megawatts and how to best design an electrical grid for the US. I actually consider it to be cooler than being paid to talk about ringtones. But at the end of the day I am spending hour after hour looking at numbers on a computer monitor, drinking overpriced coffee under the glare of fluorescent lights. Halfway through the day I have a hastily prepared lunch or eat preprocessed food that increases my cholesterol by ten points while I am eating it. In the winter I drive to work in the dark and come home in the dark. My new job marks the first time in years that I am able to tell what the weather is like outside while sitting at my desk as opposed to having to get up, walk down a hallway, turn a corner and then look out a window. All in all, I would much rather be a kid and have my afternoons being spent doing whatever I feel like. Sadly, that doesn’t pay nearly as well.

So bring your kids to the office if you feel like it. It’s probably a nice experience. But let the kids be kids. We don’t need to show them what their future holds. Let them think it is still limitless. Much better to be nine years old and dreaming of being an astronaut than realizing that you are destined to be an accountant.