Unofficially, the vacation starts now

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining this year about how Christmas falls on a Wednesday this year (“And New Year’s does, too!” some of them add, the ones who apparently have never noticed that Christmas Day and New Years Day are always on the same day of the week every year and that the alignment goes without saying, but in an effort to observe the spirit of the season I have been letting this slide) and how inconvenient it is in terms of planning vacations, travel, and so on. My wife works in a client-oriented field that includes weekend hours, so those kind of scheduling issues are kind of omnipresent for us; when Christmas falls on a Friday there’s still a pretty good chance that my wife’s place of business will be open the very next day, and she’ll be expected to dutifully report for her regular shift. So in that sense, I’m more than sympathetic to the challenges.

On the other hand, my personal narrow-view take on it is that a mid-week Christmas (and New Years) is really a best-of-both-worlds scenario. I showed up for work today and it has been sort of like a quasi-vacation. My contracting boss is already gone on leave for the holiday, as are a lot of other folks who decided they would blow two to four days of paid vacation time in order to be off from the evening of Friday the 20th until the morning of either Thursday the 26th or Monday the 30th. Not too bad, and good for them. For those of us still inhabiting the office, it’s nice and quiet. The VRE wasn’t too crowded this morning, either. I imagine tomorrow will be much the same (if not moreso) PLUS since we usually are given 59 minutes leave on the day before a holiday, I anticipate getting out of the office early, which you’ll never catch me complaining about.

I opted to spend four days of paid vacation time to take off the duration between the afternoon of Tuesday the 24th and the morning of Thursday January 2nd. I don’t know exactly how many other people will be back in action on the second day of the year, but at least a few people will still be on vacation (if the big collective contracting calendar is to be believed) and in any case it’s just one day, followed by a BizCasFri that will almost certainly be the occasion of countless people (myself included) rationalizing that their New Years resolution to get organized and on top of things really doesn’t count as going into effect until Monday the 6th.

And that’s the next time I’ll be writing a work-related blog post, I reckon. I can’t imagine there’s many people for whom that’s one of the highlight attractions for reading (although it more than justifies itself as a release valve for me so I don’t pop off at my coworkers in any truly regrettable ways), but if you’re an exception to my assumption, see you in two weeks.