On Thu, 24 May 2001, J. van Baardwijk wrote:
> At 18:04 22-5-01 -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
>
> >Have you gone to work on a major holiday to be sure
> >that things will go right?
>
> No, because when you go on a holiday for a few weeks, you make sure
> other people take over while you're gone, just as you'll do some of
> their work when they go on vacation. In the higher echelons, it
> ocassionally happens that someone gets called back from vacation, but
> things have to get very much out of control before that happens.
I think what Dan was referring to was, do you ever have to go in on
Christmas, on New Year's, on a day that is a national holiday where
everyone is supposed to have the day off? Not vacation, but a special day
where, in theory, nobody is supposed to work.
I have never gotten myself into a job where that would happen, although if
I'd learned a whole lot about networks & routers & stuff, and done some of
that in addition to the bookkeeping I was doing when I worked for an
internet company, I might very well have had to answer an emergency page
on Christmas morning, drive down to the office, and fix something. (But
no one was ever scheduled to be there on Christmas just as a matter of
course, or New Year's, or Thanksgiving. But someone had to be on call,
just in case.)
What we have had happen at times has been that, with 3 or 4 people with
check-signing authority at Dan's old company, if everyone else went out of
town at Christmastime, we'd be tied to the house even if Dan were taking
vacation time. There were a couple of times that Dan was officially on
vacation, but the only one in town who *could* sign a check, and someone
would have to bring the check over to our house to be signed. (This
wasn't as much of a hardship as it might have been; we flatly do not
travel anywhere for Christmas, if you want us to spend Christmas with you,
you have to come to our house; and I couldn't get away for very long at
the end of a quarter, especially Q4, for 4 years running. The workdays
from December 26 to December 31 were somewhat frantic ones for me....)
Julia
