Skip to main content

Keeping An Eye

J's new daycare has an atmosphere that feels like a cross between a hospital and a noisy marketplace. They keep things antiseptically clean, the classrooms are lined on both sides of a long corridor that this reminiscent of a hospital ward. There are several hundred kids and their parents rushing in and out - so there is much noise and chaos.

One neat thing they have that I haven't seen before is a closed circuit TV. It allows parents to watch their kids in their rooms while still in the lobby. I am usually rushing in and out at the speed of a tornado with no leisure to stand and stare at the screen. If instead they had a web camera that I allowed me to check on J while at work that would be immensely useful.

It would be the next best thing to being there. I am sure there are risks involved in empowering parents to keep a remote eye on their wards at all times. Some disgruntled mother could potentially record footage and use it to sue the centre for negligence. I would be curious to know if that is the why they stop at the TV at J's center.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

ggop said…
I think employees of either HP or Cisco can do just that (webcam from their desktops) when their kids go to the on site daycare.
gg
1:54 PM
Heartcrossings said…
The lucky parents ! On second thoughts though it could be major distraction for the parent and the caregiver could feel like an animal in the zoo.
8:35 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more