Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life
My life is, to me, ripe with frequent challenges, occasional successes, spontaneous laughter, adequate tears, and enough *life* to last me a lifetime. To you, however, it surely seems most pedestrian. And therefore, I recycle the name I used previously and call this my Notebooks of Daily Life. Daily, because it's everyday in nature, ordinary. These conglomeration of events that are my life are of interest to me because I live it, perhaps mildly so to those who are touched by it, and could only be of perverse, morbid curiosity to anyone else. Yet, I offer them here nonetheless. Make of them what you will, and perhaps you can learn from my mistakes.
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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
So you've planned to take a week off to sit in the sun, relax, and recharge your batteries. Only, you've got a deadline to meet. The project you're working on is due the day after you get back and, even though your vacation was scheduled long before the project timeline was set, you still have to get your part done. Or maybe it's not a specific project, just the day-to-day fires you have to deal with but, since everyone knows you'll be gone, they're making sure you address their needs before you go.
Whatever the exact situation, you end up working twice as much the week or two before you leave.
That's okay, you think, right? It's only fair, since you'll be gone, that you get things wrapped up or taken care of before you go, yes? Or is it?
Say you end up working an extra forty hours over the course of the two weeks before your vacation. And you're going to be gone for a week. That means that for those three weeks, you've put in 120 hours -- three weeks' time. And yet, you're going to lose a week's vacation time. You've basically just given your employer a week's salary as a reward for their mismanagement.
And as if that weren't enough, you spend half your vacation just recovering, physically and mentally, from the extra work you did in order to be able to go on holiday. Is it even worth it?
A good manager takes into account vacation plans when determining project schedules. A good manager makes sure that there is adequate cross-coverage so that no one person is indispensable and so that the business doesn't flounder when one person goes on holiday. A poor manager makes his subordinates pay the price for his incompetence; the employees are forced to scramble to compensate in order to save their jobs and the bad manager is praised for meeting unrealistic goals or keeping headcounts unnaturally low.
The ideal solution would be for the employees to work as normal and let the fallout land squarely where it ought to -- on management -- but rarely are employees, especially these days, willing, let alone able, to take the risk of being terminated in order to point out their supervisor's failings. And so the cycle continues.
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