Any parent who has ever worked from home has had a Robert Kelly moment. In case you missed it, and not many people have - more than 30 million have seen the Youtube video - earlier in the week the Professor was giving a live interview on BBC about the impeachment of South Korea's president and his children crashed the interview.
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It was hilarious, Marion swaggers in, little James follows in his walker, and then his wife, Jung-A, who apparently didn't realise the kids were in the study with dad until she saw them on the television, sneaks in like a SEAL rescue team and whips them both out in no time at all. And Professor Kelly continued the interview in fine style.
The family has since spoken about the ordeal, seeing the humour in it themselves, calling it a "comedy of errors".
Which just about sums up life as a working parent.
When I think back over my 16 years where I've juggled both words and children there are some fabulous highlights.
One favourite was a phone interview I did with television legend Ray Martin. The only time I could get just happened to coincide with my children's swimming lessons. But I thought hey, they'll be in the water, with their instructor, what can go wrong. So I perched myself somewhere close to the pool edge at CISAC, somewhere I thought I would be private enough to ask Martin some hard hitting questions. Things were going swimmingly, so to speak, with the interview, until Martin began to notice the strange background noises. Splashing, children yelling, loud speaker announcements … and then he began to interview me. He was genuinely worried that I was being a neglectful parent when I told him the children were in the pool while I was on the phone, I had to work very hard to convince him they would be ok. I've always thought Martin a very kind man and this instance reconfirmed my assessment of him.
Another time I was interviewing Anthony Field from The Wiggles. My children were of a wiggly age, and I become something of a self-appointed Wiggles Editor for the paper, jumping at the chance to interview the skivvied ones any time I could. How many working parent brownie points do you think you wrack up when you can come home and say "Guess who mum interviewed today?". Heaps. But as chance would have it I was home with the kids for some reason on the scheduled day. And so I thought, cool, I'll just whack a Wiggles video (and it was a video back then too) on and let them watch it while I sneak up to my room and do the interview there. Not quite. But Field was great, we chatted, dealt with interruptions, answered questions my kids wanted answered there on the spot. And then the best thing of all, he revealed to me that his had plonked his own kids in front of a video while we were doing the interview - and it was a Wiggles video. Ha. Imagine being able to sit down and watch dad.
Usually, as the children grew older, I would tell them not to come up and interrupt me while I was doing an interview. When you're talking to people overseas I find it much easier to do late nights. Any working parent knows what mornings do not go well. You do not need an interview thrown in amongst lunches and shoe searching. They usually cope pretty well but this one night I was interviewing author Patricia Cornwell something terrible happened down the other end of the house. Something perhaps befitting a Cornwell novel, some horrible murderous thing, because there was screaming and unidentifiable noises, and then two children came flying into the bedroom at each other's throats.
It's amazing how much mime a working parent knows when they're trying to calm two children, alternatively pointing at the phone, running a finger across a throat and putting a shh-ing finger up to a lip. Cornwell didn't miss a beat. The kids calmed down. Perhaps that scene appeared in her next book.
