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13 minute read

May 30, 2025, 1:05 PM

(post about boundaries at work, like JMU residence life and WMATA utility. Also school homework conditioning us that school has no boundaries and setting us up for poor work-life balance later in life)

Recently, I was thinking about how some people do a remarkably poor job maintaining a healthy separation between home and work, and making sure to have a life outside of work.  I also can’t help but think that it’s the logical result of conditioning that we all received as children.  As children, after all, we start out being pretty good at setting boundaries, as any child that says “no” about something could probably attest to.  But then the ability to maintain boundaries and to maintain a healthy separation between the different parts of our lives is trained out of us as we grow up, and as adults, we have to relearn how to set those boundaries and relearn how to set and maintain that separation between work and having a life.

I would argue that this lack of respect for boundaries between various parts of one’s life starts very early, in school.  I remember that school liked to make a lot of demands of my time outside of school.  Homework, school projects, and the like taught us all that school was your entire life, and that this took priority over all of your other activities.  It actually got to the point where I was made to felt guilty about engaging in activities that I enjoyed because I “should” be doing things for school instead.

I know that I’ve said a lot of negative things about my elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas, but homework was one thing that Grimes did right: they didn’t assign any.  Later in my school career, after leaving Grimes, they told us that the goal was to have an hour or so of homework every night.  Grimes didn’t assign any, and we did all of our work at school.  I appreciated that, because it meant that once school was over, I could leave school at school and focus on my various other interests.  In other words, it was a healthy separation between school and personal.  My parents, on the other hand, were always critical of that, suggesting that it was wrong that Grimes didn’t assign daily homework.  However, I suspect that some of their criticisms of the school were rooted in the idea that everything in Arkansas was bad or wrong because it was Arkansas.  They didn’t really want to move out there in the first place, but it was a good career move for Dad at the time.  But as far as the homework went, I was fine with not having any, because I understood that school happened at school, and my personal life happened at home.

I also remembered being told around this time by my parents that homework was a normal part of life, and that one would always have homework, even as an adult, so I might as well get used to it now.  That would turn out to be inaccurate, but also, both of my parents had been teachers in the 1970s, so it might have come from that, i.e. they might have brought work home on a regular basis.  It was kind of like the inaccurate statements that teachers would always make about the teachers in some next tier up that turned out never to be true.  My favorite one was where they would say that the teachers in the following tiers (sixth grade, high school, college, whatever) would just throw away papers without a name on them.  That would turn out to be a lie.  All throughout my education, if someone submitted a paper and forgot to put their name on it, the teacher would either figure out who it belonged to by process of elimination, or ask the class whose it was, typically saying, “Someone turned in a paper without a name on it,” and then whoever the responsible party was would claim it.  This even happened in college, where professors would try to match an anonymous paper with its owner in order to ensure that proper credit was given.  After all, someone put effort into that paper, even if, in their rush to complete it, they forgot to put their name on it, and no one really wants to see someone’s efforts go to waste.

Then when we moved to Virginia, the schools would regularly assign homework.  My parents were happy, but I never appreciated this intrusion into my personal time.  The idea was that school could have me from 8 AM to 3 PM, but after that, school was over, and I had other matters to attend to.  But that’s where the guilt over doing pleasurable things began, under the idea that I “should” be doing school work instead.  School knew no boundaries when it came to intruding on one’s personal life, and it laid the foundations for the idea that work always takes precedence over your personal life, and that your personal life must take a back seat.

So with all of that in mind, imagine what it was like when I got my first job at age 16, doing directory assistance at CFW Information Services.  I loved it, and I liked that I went in, did my job and went home.  They weren’t telling me to complete more work at home, that’s for sure.  Parents were wrong on that one.  However, I was also introduced to the idea of the “flexible schedule”, which in this case, meant that you would have to be flexible to fit their schedule, rather than the other way around, as the schedule would vary from day to day and week to week, with different days off, sometimes together and sometimes not.  It made trying to plan your life difficult, because the work schedule would be published about a week out (the schedule would publish on Mondays, and we would start working it the following Sunday), so you didn’t get much notice to plan your life.  I really fell behind on doctor’s visits during that time, as my work schedule made it difficult to commit to things.  One could request days off in advance, but you wouldn’t know for sure whether your requests had been granted or denied until the schedule for the requested week came out.  So one could plan and plan and plan, but then the Monday before the week in question, you might find out when checking the schedule book that you were denied.  Though to their credit, at least they were fairly consistent over the course of the week, i.e. if you were scheduled for evenings, you would work evenings for the entire week, if you were working a split shift, you worked splits pretty much all week, etc., though the specific times might vary here and there.  They generally scheduled by seniority, putting new people on nights and splits, and then with regular employee turnover, your schedule would gradually shift to earlier in the day, as more people were hired behind you and people ahead of you left the company.  If it tells you anything, by the time that they closed, I had been working there for nearly five years, and my schedule was pretty close to nine-to-five.  I suspect that a lot of the inconsistency with days off came with the company’s trying to rotate the weekends so that everyone got Saturday and Sunday off on a somewhat regular basis.  I understood the principle behind it, but the result was not something that you could really plan around or otherwise predict except for the usual one week out.  Likewise, even if you did get the same days off for several weeks, which happened a few times, you really didn’t want to plan too much around it because the next week wasn’t guaranteed, and it could change at any time.

One thing that this sort of schedule was conducive for, though, was working overtime.  The pay wasn’t amazing, but it was easy work, and if you couldn’t make plans that far out because of the way that the schedule was done, it wasn’t a hard ask to work overtime.  And I admit that I put in a good bit of overtime there, because it just worked out.  Working a lot of overtime has its own issues, as it tips the scale of work-life balance more on the work side.  I remember one time when I was working a lot of overtime, my sister remarked, “All he does is eat, sleep, and work!”

Then there was life as a resident advisor at JMU.  That was a job that really didn’t respect a boundary between one’s personal and professional lives.  It was also a very different beast than CFW.  In that case, the job was live-in, so there was a certain expectation of availability there because you lived at the job location.  That was a job where they didn’t respect your personal life at all, and saw no boundary between you, the student, and you, their employee.  You were considered always on the job, even if you were clearly not in your building or even on campus, and to truly take time off meant to leave town and stay somewhere else – and even then, if someone from your building were to see you doing something unseemly, they still considered it within their purview and could hold you accountable for it.  So no real respect for any concept of personal time or otherwise off-duty time.  The lack of respect for boundaries between one’s personal life and one’s professional life was pretty astonishing, and they wasted no time in demonstrating that during staff training before our residents showed up, where the training sessions were all day every day for something like ten days straight, and then we had to do all of the building prep that we were required to do at night after those sessions.  We were all completely exhausted, and then they would have bags of candy at the sessions for us to snack on if we started to get sleepy.  No wonder why we all got sleepy, though, because the trainings were boring as hell, and we were doing an exhausting schedule.  Forget homework from your job.  Job and home were one and the same.

But that was just the introduction.  Then for first-year RAs, they also had an additional training session in the first part of the fall semester.  That was structured as a class, PSYC 100, called “Interpersonal Skills for Resident Advisors”, and was basically an extension of the training, taught by a hall director and a full-time staff member.  It was worth one credit, and most students received an “A” for the class.  I didn’t mind the “A”, but I didn’t like the concept of its being a credit course because it crossed the line between my role as a student and my role as an employee.  I didn’t mind the additional training, and thought that it was helpful in navigating the job, but I resented the part where it was a college credit, because of that separation.  In other words, yes, I would have preferred that the additional training be simply part of the job and have no bearing on my academic standing in any way.  The most that Residence Life should have ever had to do with my academic life in my capacity as their employee was to verify that I had the requisite GPA for the position, and then just as an up or down.  There was no formal boundary between the two roles, and they took full advantage of that.  Especially so when I was having trouble academically (though when wasn’t I having trouble academically in college?), and they made it their mission to try to help me academically, whether I wanted it or not – and I didn’t want it, because I didn’t see it as their place in their role as my employer, but they insisted, and I resisted, doing my best to establish a boundary between personal and professional, but they constantly crossed it.  It’s like, are you my boss, my academic advisor, or my parents?  One of those is your role, but for the others, there are other people who properly have those roles, and you are wrongly attempting to usurp their roles.

And all of that nonsense and intrusion into my personal life was for a total compensation of $3,645 for the entire year.  And that salary did not include room rent, as we were still responsible for the cost of the lodging, which made the breaches of boundaries all the more unnerving, since they weren’t providing the space, and it really was teeny money that they were paying for all of the nonsense relating to their meddling in affairs that they really had no business meddling in.  And for the record, I will never do another live-in job ever again.  I always want the workplace to be separate from my home.

Then Walmart was good in the sense of not intruding on your personal life like Residence Life did, but their schedule was closer to that of CFW, where it prevented you from having a life.  While Walmart had you list your availability to work for scheduling purposes, that was largely theoretical, as they would only hire full-time employees with fully open availability, i.e. people who could work any day and at any time.  CFW didn’t ask about availability.  They just scheduled.  Walmart also published their schedule about three weeks out, which was longer than CFW did, but they were very inconsistent with their times.  So even though you could plan your life a little bit further out, because you had more notice about what your schedule would be, it was all over the place, where you could work opening, closing, midday, and any variation thereof all in the same week, plus days off would vary.  That inconsistency would make it very hard to plan a schedule, because your schedule could be wildly different from day to day.  Though interestingly, for about nine months or so, my schedule settled down to a 7 AM to 4 PM shift, with Wednesdays and Thursdays off.  Nobody said anything to me about it.  It just happened.  Then just as it came, it stopped, and my days off started being all over the place again, and so were my hours.  The thing that bothered me about the way that Walmart scheduled is that particularly on things like the Service Desk, they ran the same shifts every day, so they could very well have scheduled people in consistent schedules all week and had one person covering days off, but instead they just moved us all around.  In other words, that kind of wacko scheduling was a choice, and it wreaked havoc on one’s sleep schedule, as there were many occasions where I was scheduled to get off of work at 11 PM, only to have to come right back in at 7 AM.  Not fun.  And it’s not like you could try to add some consistency to your schedule by working overtime, because Walmart did not allow it.  I still remember an occasion where I had overtime on account of my not being relieved on the register in time, and my assistant manager told me, “You had twenty minutes of overtime last week.  Don’t let it happen again.”  All that said, it was impossible to do things that happened on a regular basis, because you wouldn’t be available consistently, and there was no predictability to it.

Then there was Food & Water Watch.  That was a whole different can of beans than any job that I’d had before.  Unlike other places that I’d worked, where there were many employees doing the same jobs, we were not interchangeable at Food & Water Watch, as every employee had a different role.  The place was a Monday through Friday nine-to-five job, and everyone was paid on salary.  So one could easily plan one’s life outside of work, because the hours and days off were set.  With everyone’s having separate roles, you had your work that you needed to do, and if you didn’t do it, it didn’t get done.  Most of the job descriptions said, “Long hours possible,” and it was very tempting to fall into that trap.  I fell into that trap of long hours a number of times.  This was also the first job that I had where it was possible to bring work home.  At CFW and Walmart, work could only be performed at work, plus with those jobs’ being hourly, it was illegal to perform work off of the clock.  Then at JMU, the line between home and work was very blurry because it was a salaried live-in job.  Fairly early in my time there, I made a vow to myself: I would not bring work home.  If I needed to do work-related things during off-hours, I would haul myself into the office and do it there.  That made things more difficult, as it meant having to go the twelve miles and 60-some traffic signals from Aspen Hill, Maryland to downtown Washington, DC.  However, that difficulty was by design, to make sure that I really wanted to go because of the extra effort to go there.  The overarching idea was that work belonged at work, and home belonged at home, and maintaining separate environments for each.  There were a few occasions where I straight up worked from home, but they were few and far between, and were done largely to accomplish specific tasks.  What I absolutely didn’t want to do was make it a habit of bringing work home, because that is no way to live.  My mother, when she taught middle school, would bring work home most days.  So after leaving school and getting home, she would set up at a desk at home and start grading papers.  My thought was, why are you letting this work material contaminate the home environment?  I mean, seriously.  That’s just added stress that you have to deal with in what is supposed to be your safe place.  Not a good thing.

Then Food & Water Watch was also the company that actively tried to distance itself from this website.  I remember that after some lunatic ran a hit piece about me based around this Journal entry after finding my name on Food & Water Watch’s staff bio page, my boss asked me to include one of those stupid “my opinions are my own” disclaimers on the website.  First of all, excuse you – this is my website, not yours.  You don’t dictate what goes onto my website.  You are work, and so stay on your side.  The website is on the “home” side of things, and so it is outside of your sphere of influence.  I’m proud of how I handled it, though.  I didn’t quite laugh in his face (even though he totally deserved it for that request), but I knew that the answer would effectively be “no”.  What I ended up doing was to strengthen some language about content ownership on my content licensing page, stating explicitly that I am the sole owner of my own content.  He didn’t like it, but he also recognized that I had indeed complied with his request, even if it wasn’t the way that he had intended.  Then I removed that line a few years later when I redid the page, i.e. the line was never truly necessary.

In my current job, maintaining the balance between home and work is easy enough if you just do your contracted assignment.  That’s how I tend to do things: I go to work, complete the schedule that I picked, and then I go home.  The big thing there is that, as one colleague put it, “We pick our own medicine,” because we choose the runs that we want each cycle.  If you choose a run, that is your schedule until it’s time to pick again, and if you pick the extra board, you explicitly choose to have a schedule that is all over the place, because in that case, you’re the guy who they use to fill in the holes in the schedule.  And even then, it’s separated out as day extra board and night extra board, though “night” is sometimes only theoretical, as I was definitely brought it at 6 AM a number of times on the “night” board.  But it’s when you start volunteering for overtime and such when it becomes a problem, because the volunteering process is not very granular, and indicates a lack of respect for any boundaries.  You sign up for overtime by the month, and you have two lists: for working on your days off, and for working extra blocks before or after your normal run.  That’s it.  And you are responsible for any overtime that they assign you via the overtime board for the entire month, and have to request and be approved to be excused from the overtime board in order to get out of it on specific days – and then they limit you to a small number of days.  You aren’t allowed to specify the parameters under which you will work overtime, e.g. I am only willing to work an extra block after my regular run on Mondays and Tuesdays, or, I only want to work on my day off on Thursdays, or I am only willing to work overtime on these dates.  Doesn’t work like that, unfortunately.  If you want to work overtime, you are more or less obligated to give the company your entire life, and they will take full advantage of that.  Similarly, for a program that is called “utility”, where operators can be taken off of their regular runs on an as-needed basis to do other roles such as supervisor, depot clerk, tower operator, etc., you also have to give over your entire life, as they will schedule you at any time of day, and also – and this is important – change your days off.  I pick my days off for a reason, because that’s how I plan my life.  If I don’t have that, it’s basically back to that Walmart life, even if it is with greater responsibility, because I wouldn’t be able to plan anything outside of work due to inconsistent scheduling.  I decided a while ago that I’m now too old for that nonsense, and won’t tolerate it.  So I just pick myself a nice, fat run that has a lot of built-in overtime, and call it a day.  And I’m content with that.  It keeps work and home separate, and boundaries are clearly defined, i.e. work only gets to have me on these days from this time to this time, and outside of that, my life is mine to do whatever I want with.

I suppose all of that is just to say to make sure that you allow room to have a personal life outside of your work.  We should not be entirely defined by our jobs, and no one says, “I wish that I had spent more time at the office,” while on their deathbed.  Have a life, and make sure that it’s the best one that you can muster.

Categories: JMU, Work