Work Daze

If you were surprised by a bunch of midgets running around your office on April 27, I have the explanation. These weren’t Munchkins, and you had not fallen into a low-budget remake of “Wizard of Oz.” The 27th was “Bring Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day,” and if you didn’t participate, you not only missed a great opportunity to depress your children, but you also gave your workplace competitors a major chance to move ahead of you in the race for promotion, salary, and longevity.

It’s true! Given the stress, expense, and aggravation surrounding the raising of children, about the only good reason for reproducing these days is to use your kid as a tool for career advancement. And though the organizers of Bring Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day have idealistic reasons for inventing this new holiday, I’m pretty darn sure that leveraging the kiddos is what they really had in mind.

Marc Karasu, a Senior Vice President with the employment web site, HotJobs, certainly had his eye on the prize when he sent me an email with this most excellent advice relating to the happy day: “Looking for a way to get kudos with your boss? Try becoming buddies with his or her kids.”

Well, exactly. Waylaying the boss’s kids, stuffing them with ice cream and candy, buying them Barbies and bicycles, and teaching them to recite your name and salary demands—that’s what it takes to get ahead these days. [It’s also what it takes to get arrested for kidnapping, so watch your step.]

It’s too late for the 2006 kids at work celebration, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start planning for next year’s event. Nor should you discount the possibility that the boss’s spawn will be in the office for other reasons, like the annual scourging of the marketing department, or wonderful annual ceremony where your numero uno gets his weight in rubies and stock options. You may also run into the boss’s kids when you are performing regular work tasks, like detailing the boss’s Bentley, or dropping off the dry cleaning.

Unfortunately, lavishing attention on the boss’s kids is such an obvious strategy that you may have to be extra clever in how you approach the task. Your office enemies will certainly want to pay their respect to the little princes and princesses so be prepared to involve yourself in a bidding war for their affection.

You could, I suppose, start stocking your cubical with a variety of lavishly wrapped gifts [a good source is the annual “Toys For Tots” drive], but I recommend you bypass the autographed Star Wars gift sets and diamond-encrusted Easy-Bake ovens your competitors will try to foist on the royal family. Instead, simply buy a pony and keep it in your cubical until the little lord or lady arrives at the workplace. Ponies don’t eat much and they can help you with your workload until the great day arrives. [You can also supplement your meager income by giving rides to the IT people.]

At this point you may be bursting with a question: “Bob,” you ask. “What if my boss doesn’t have children and what if I do? Is there still some way I can use my kids to get ahead?” The answer is “yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”

If your boss has no children, it’s probably because she or he has been so focused on their own career progress that they have no time for sex, or they are such awful human beings that natural selection has prevented them from finding a mate. In this case, it makes good sense to offer your children to your boss. She or he can simply borrow them for “Bring Our Daughters and Sons To Work Day,” or you could work out a lease-purchase agreement, whereby the boss gets custody when they’re young and cute, and can return them when they reach the teen-age years when they tend to become spiky and expensive.

Whatever the arrangement, be sure to train your children to mindlessly parrot your unabashed admiration and worship of your boss. Forget drilling the little ones on their multiplication tables and phonics. Focus instead on key phrases, like “My Daddy thinks you’re a genius,” or “Mommy says I can’t have heart surgery, because she doesn’t make enough money.”

If you’re really lucky, maybe your kids will participate in “Take Our Mommies and Daddies to Kindergarten Day.” Now there’s a work place where you could really kick butt.