Work-life balance seems to be a corporate catch phrase that was ushered along with Gen Y into the workplace about ten years ago. As a self-admitted workaholic, the concept is a bit foreign to me.
I interpret it to mean, “Awesome! I have a laptop so that I can work from bed when I have insomnia at 4am, or maybe I’ll work from home one day a week so that I can get a load of laundry done in the midst of my 12 hour work day.” My workload is just always larger than the space it was designed to fit. As long as I can occasionally duck out at 4:30, I’m fine turning in 60 hour, six-day work weeks.
However, I’ve learned that the bigger blur between work and life is what I do when I’m on my laptop. For example, I tweet and check Facebook sporadically on the clock, and when I travel, I blog from my work laptop when I’m done working for the day. As a result, my desktop is frequently cluttered with a melange of items for both personal and professional arenas.
Generally, that works out fine. But tonight I came frighteningly close to attaching the wrong file. I was emailing my boss, making a case for a seminar in online marketing that I’d like to attend for on-going professional development. Except, instead of attaching the enrollment form, I almost attached this image instead of the screen capture of the enrollment URL:
Clearly, I need to work on my naming conventions if I accidentally almost attach a screen capture of SouthPark intended for a blog post to a professional message. Even so, it made me giggle, imagining her reaction:
“Oh nice, I see Alison wants to attend the Online Marketing Summit again this year. Let me go ahead and sign that form…”
Click… then…
“What the hell is this? A cartoon man in a bathrobe?! Oh my God… is she surfing cartoon porn at work?!”
Somehow, I think that error might have made the work-life scale tip a bit in the balance of life. Whew.
pithypants 
haha, OR she might have thought you needed that marketing seminar even more!