Daddy Daughters Day


Each year there’s a Bring Your Child To Work Day, which translates to an afternoon of the girls running amok in the office. If it were to be an accurate depiction of my daily duties, I suppose La Serpiente would sit at my desk and make a combination of obscene gestures and awkward puns about data, while Destroyer raided the microkitchen for snacks. But since that might be frowned upon by any right-thinking person, instead the kids are entertained with child friendly activities.

They both got to paint, and to make their own soap, both things they enjoyed but I fear gave them an unrealistic expectation of the world of work (and probably tells them I spend my days goofing off) but better than that was the Balloon Room.

Some genius filled a meeting room with balloons, to a height of at least five feet, and then let the children go in. They didn’t remove the furniture, which lurked like wood-and-steel-framed sandbanks in the sea of balloons. The girls loved it, or at least La Serpiente did, vanishing into the balloons, the only evidence of her being a wave of bouncing balloons on the surface as she scurried this way and that.

Destroyer, being half her height, was a bit disconcerted by a world of nothing but balloons. She’d appear at times, stuck in a crevasse of squeaky inflated plastic and say “windy” too me, not quite getting the right adjective for the situation.

Perhaps this was a good metaphor for work after all.

After some hours of this, and taking them up to the canteen where they were placed inside an enormous bubble, we took them down to my desk, at which point La Serpiente sprinted into a trompe de l’oeil room and, while not paying attention to the rules of perspective, spanged herself into a doorknob and fell to the floor weeping. At which point I took her home, and didn’t let her have any balloons. I am harsh but fair. Or harsh but unrelenting.

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