A recent meeting ended at work and a colleague and I remained in the room, furiously typing emails. We finished, looked up, and realized we hadn’t done our catch-up chat in awhile.

We ended up talking family stuff (he has four kids - FOUR! - which I cannot even comprehend) and how we do the fatherly juggle.

“I don’t know how you do it with four. Your wife has a flexible schedule, right?” I inquired, digging for the magic potion to his life.

“Yes, but she teaches piano and has a weird schedule, so I am frequently the carpooler.” He replied, graciously, clearly a very involved father.

He continued: “Probably the only reason I still work here is because I can work from home a few days a week.”

Shocked?

Don’t be.

Us dads care about the flex-time thing, too, and it drives our decisions to stay at certain jobs, or leave them.

This colleague of mine and I started right around the same time I did, (when we were a dinky, VC-backed startup with big dreams) and we’ve charted each other’s progress and kept tabs on our respective “temperatures.” Each time we’ve spoken over the past year, the situation has been different: at first, we were in different offices (he in Boston, me in New York), and then, he was on the verge of quitting because of his arduous commute, which cut badly into his family time. But now, he seems to have found his “balance” - at least as well as can be had in our world of constant client complaining.

The moral here is that the topic of flex-time or telecommuting is vital to the male population of companies, even though it’s almost exclusively the women who demand the most media about it.

So how “flex” is your job/company - or comment on a past job - and did its flexibility (or lack thereof) cause you to want to stay or make you want to leave?