How To WAT
My sister Debbie and I are having a WAT-relationship. And now you’re saying: “A what?”. No, not that ‘what’. WAT is an abbreviation I made up myself and it stands for Working Apart Together. Like LAT (Living Apart Together), but then about work. She lives in the USA and I live in the Netherlands. Because we wanted to do something together, we first started another blog called ‘Multiculti Cooking’, because we love everything about food. Cooking, baking, eating, talking and even dreaming about food is our hobby. Then we decided to also do another blog which is work related and about multicultural subjects, because we are multicultural ourselves. That’s how we came to ‘MultiCulti Chica’.’
And now the question is: “How do you WAT?” when one sister lives in the USA and the other in the Netherlands which makes the time difference 6 hours. Well, Debbie calls me while driving to her job and often also during her lunchbreak. So the first time I talk to her in the afternoon and the second time in the evening. We’re very lucky that these days there are many tools we can use to communicate. When calling we used Skype in the past and now we use Whatsapp, which we also use for text messaging. Furthermore we use e-mails when we’re not able to call and OneNote to share documents with each other. Sometimes we also connect in the middle of the night when it’s still evening at her side, because I’m often awake at night due to the use of prednisolone which messes up my biorhythm.
Even though working this way goes very well, in the near future we’ll be able to work together at the same location because I’m moving to the USA which makes it a lot easier. Because sometimes you want to show each other something quickly on for instance a computer screen and that’s not possible right now. In a way it’s a bit strange to work this way, but on the other hand together we can make long working hours. When I sleep Debbie is working and the other way around, which makes us available for 24 hours a day. This is what you really can call a fulltime job.
