ADVENTURES IN HOUSESITTING

Learning to Say “I Don’t Know”

Lessons from a boat that serve us in the workplace

I really should give engineers more credit. One of my brothers — a talented engineer — jokes about how cameras are always off in his telepresence team meetings (do non-engineers use the word “telepresence?”) and that you know an engineer is an extrovert if they look at your shoes when talking to you instead of their own. So it was I’ve assumed those in the profession pick up emotional cues as well as a hippopotamus can pick up a vase of flowers.

Yet among everyone in the tight-knit retirement community drenched with sunshine and small dogs where I housesat for more than a month last year, it was a former engineer who picked up on the fact that a 40-something extrovert would benefit from more human interaction than four walks a day with two darling pupsters around the friendly neighborhood would yield.

All photos by author. I snapped this one before we headed out. Don’t ask me to name anything beyond “boat, sky, and water.”

And so it came to be during a 2022 housesit that I found myself going sailing one beautiful Friday after work. Sailing! I’d not been on a boat in ages and looked forward to the adventure all day. With images of us peacefully bobbing along the Atlantic coast, I changed out of my work-from-home uniform of professional-on-top-but-yoga-pants-with-pockets-for-empty-poop-bags-on-bottom and into…