Xeney mentioned in today's entry that when she is home "I never want to talk about work; I just want to forget about it when I'm home and I don't want to take the time to explain things."

I feel exactly the same way, in fact so completely to I forget my job while I'm home that if someone from work calls, I have to pause a few seconds to reload all the files onto my mental hard drive before anything they say makes any sense.

My wife is just the opposite. She's not happy untill she has debriefed on all the details of her workday.

I asked a couple of friends, and they were debriefers also.

So I was wondering which is more common. Do you forget your workday on the way home, or must you review it with someone before you can relax?

-- Anonymous, January 14, 2000

Answers

If something amusing or annoying happened, I want to debrief my spouse about it. I don't feel the need to tell him about everything I do on an average day.

I want to hear all about his day, too. He doesn't tell me nearly as much as I'd like to hear.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

I only want to debrief or listen to my husband debrief if something * unusual* happened. Most people have pretty boring jobs, and telling someone else the details of what they did all day at work is well, pretty darn boring as well.

Fortunately my husband and I feel about the same when it comes to this topic, and I also feel fortunate that we can just spend a lot of time together without talking a lot about boring topics like what we did at work all day.

I tend to be like Beth in wanting to just put work out of my mind as soon as I leave the office. I think my husband *thinks* about his job more when he's not there, but at least he doesn't feel the need to * talk* about it excessively.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

My husband's the debriefer - I've had to put a moratorium on work- related discussion at the dinner table. We work on flipsides of the same business (his organization is a User entity for our program), and not only am I dogtired of talking shop by then, there is also much that it would not be ethical to discuss with him at all.

And when his debriefing consists of griping about my organization, it's just too difficult to resist the urge to explain to him the 'big picture' that he isn't getting - which is way more than he wanted when he started griping.

It's really just best for us both not to Go There.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

Occasionally, though I rarely have anything new or interesting to say. I try to call her up once a day and find out how her day is going. She rarely has anything new to report either, but I like hearing from her anyway.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000

We're both debriefers, which works out well, unless on of us is tired. The up side of this is we both work from home usually, so there's not much to catch up on. Occasionally, though, we will both be so busy in the same house we've hardly seen one another. Go figure.

There are also times when we tell one another a story, and the other one has to say, "I know, I was there..."

Another down side is we can have work related conversations at 1 a.m.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2000