A Week’s Vacation

As this piece goes live, I am at the end of a week of vacation from work. I am wondering if it is the first one I have ever had.

Of course, I have taken the occasionally week off during my lawyering career. One time in my life I took two weeks. I did this after a conversation with another attorney, whose theory was that a single week was just not enough time to really relax. “The first two or three days you are still winding down from work, and then suddenly next week starts to loom again” was how he put it to me. He turned out to be right, because the one time I took two whole weeks it was glorious.

But – and yes, there is a big But – were those really vacations from work? As a practicing lawyer I was usually able to take as much time out of the office as I wanted. The catch? Whatever was on my desk when I left was waiting for me upon my return, along with overflowing in-boxes of mail (whether voice, e or snail). This, I think, is pretty much the norm for any self-employed person. You hurry up to get a little ahead of things before you leave, and then you have to hurry to catch up when you get back. It is a little like jumping off of a merry-go-round and then having to jump back on before it has made a complete revolution.

Then there is the question of whether my time off was actually paid or not. In my own office it was all about the generation of revenue. When I was at my desk I was bringing money in the front door. When I was not at my desk I was not. One week of “vacation” resulted in a month where revenue would be roughly 25% less than it was for the other months of the year. Yes, I know – things should be structured so that you build in enough working hours to “pay for” a week or two off through the year. Maybe this is why I tended to take my time off in the form of long weekends rather than entire weeks. Because when you are not getting out of any work and when you are taking a financial hit every time you are out of the office for a week, is it really a vacation?

This past week has been different. Having hit the one-year anniversary with my current employer, I came into two weeks of paid time off. And this first week has been glorious. Not perfect, mind you, but glorious none the less.

The difference is that the work is still getting done – it is just getting done by others while I am out. When I go back I will jump right into what needs to be done on Monday. I will not, however, be responsible for making extra runs to make up for what I missed. I am also getting paid the same as on the weeks I am there. This, I have discovered, is how to make for a truly relaxing week off from work.

So, what did we do? Marianne and I had formed some loose ideas for the week – which all went completely out the window when I came down with flu-like symptoms on my last day at work. I felt terrible for the first 3 days, and Marianne seems to have picked up where I left off as I began to feel better. But there are worse ways to spend a week being sick – like if you are not getting paid or if you are worrying about falling behind at work.

So, it wasn’t the best vacation week ever, but then again, it was far from the worst. And the best news? I get another week off in October!

22 thoughts on “A Week’s Vacation”

    • Thanks – whatever this was, it has taken awhile to be finally over it. All I can do is appreciate that I didn’t have to be working for the week when we have been going through our shared illness.

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  2. I’ve often considered doing nothing is completely underrated in our current society. Personally, I sometimes ‘waste’ entire weekends by sitting inside during nice weather — we don’t have many of those each year, but sometimes it’s just necessary.

    I like the line from Office Space which goes something along the lines of: “What did you do this weekend, Peter?” “Nothing. And it was everything I thought it could be”.

    Hopefully your October week isn’t afflicted with illness.

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  3. Well, congratulations on finally getting a real week of vacation, bummer indeed that you were sick for part of it. You have inspired several thoughts on vacations, so I apologize in advance for the length here:

    My father was a teacher, and although he was studying for his masters of education during summers and money was tight we had tremendous vacations during my childhood. 2 weeks of camping was typical, a 3 week road trip out west in 1979, and 2 weeks in Holland one year. It was highly enjoyable, and nobody took me aside and said “Ok kid, enjoy this while you can, because you’re life will NOT be like this!”

    I work for a European company, and most of our head office takes all of July off (it’s a Finnish thing, you can look it up). This wasn’t so bad when the company was more decentralized, but now in a lot of cases we are left tap dancing for our customers saying “Well, I can’t get that drawing updated now but my colleague will be back in 4 weeks” Tappity tap tap…. It’s hard to tell but from the other holidays they get I figure about 10 weeks per year is typical.

    One of my good friends works in Canada but he is somehow employed through the American arm and his manager is in PA. He got told by her that the company was doing away with set amounts of vacation, he got a small raise in lieu and he could take as much vacation as he wanted. He got a big frown when he said “Ok, I’ll tell you right now that I’ll be taking 5 weeks, the same as my allotment this year. And I want to get paid out on my banked days.” I think the main idea was that people tend to take less vacation under this arrangement, which benefits the company.

    So between the excess of Europe and the barbarism of the United States, I’m at 5 weeks in Canada. I took 3 days off last week, and the river of email rolled on like the Columbia and continued when I got back. I decided I wasn’t even going to look at those emails, and although I got several this week starting with “I emailed you last week and…” I’m not going to feed bad, I get too many emails every day and can’t keep up, so why look at old ones. Currently at 1882 unread…

    I hope your next vacation is better. I suggest Ireland.

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    • Oh, I do not miss my old overflowing email box AT ALL! I always had just enough OCD in me that a backlog of unread emails ate at me. Yes, 98% of them became irrelevant after a month or so, but not all of them.

      There are plenty of companies in the US where, if you stay long enough, you get to 4 weeks of vacation. Unfortunately, I never worked at one of those and am probably at an age where I will not get there at this company. Oh well, I will enjoy what I get.

      My childhood vacations were, with rare exceptions, all about going to visit relatives in various distant parts of the country.

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  4. The one good thing about the construction and factory summer jobs of my youth was when I clocked out, I was truly off the job until I clocked in again the next day or after a weekend. Unlike the higher paid office jobs I held later in life when I never clocked in or out.

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    • I get it completely – it is a real luxury to go back to “clock out” jobs at this stage of life. I am tired of worrying about everyone else’s problems. This way I can worry about (or ignore) my own.

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  5. Now you know what another advantage of being blue collar and union represented. I have been an employee protected by our contact all my life, thirty plus, working years at least. I was always able to take whatever vacation leave I had accrued, or the company would cash me out every year. Later I had a more responsible position but again, I would catch up on all my work, and I’d be done until I got back. The load was picked up by the other employees, though items specific to things that I’d done might be waiting for me, but nothing new was added. Once I took four weeks of accrued vacation, always paid time off! I found myself getting pretty bored by the end.

    Now I’m retired, vacation leave, what’s that?

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    • You had one of those gigs that has become increasingly rare. I sometimes wonder what my life might have looked like if I had gone that route. But then I think about how the biggest industrial employer in my home town (International Harvester) would have shut down its plant about 2 or 3 years after the time when I might have started. Even the trades would have had me begging for a few years with the truly horrible economy of 1980-82, when I would have been at the bottom of anyone’s seniority scale. I guess all we can do is respond to the situations we are presented with. Congratulations on your retirement!

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  7. Yes to at least two weeks vacation! My husband was told by his doctor, and his employer agreed, that two weeks is the minimum for good mental health!

    Staying at home can be the best vacation ever. When we lived overseas, we spent every vacation traveling to the places we would probably not get to see when we ended our expat experience. We quickly found that after a week of touring around a foreign land, we really just wanted to get back home and take a week to recover from the vacation!

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  8. Congratulations that you’re with the new employer a year already, but a bummer about the flu-like symptoms that erased part of the enjoyment of the time off for both of you. Hopefully by the time October is here, it might feel like Fall and you will feel like a million bucks and able to enjoy it.

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  9. Congratulations on the work anniversary and the vacation! Not so much about being under the weather. It’s interesting for me to read how everyone has had difference experiences in accrual of vacation and if there is an associated cost.

    Where I work a person earns ten hours per month of annual leave until they have been there ten years. Years ten to fifteen give you twelve hours per month; year fifteen and beyond gives one fourteen hours. Leave can be accumulated to two years total earning, with any overage wiped on November 1 of each year. So, technically, one can easily exceed their two year allotment depending upon usage, timing, etc. For years each May I have received a “Dear Jason” letter telling me of my current leave level, combined with what will be earned by October 31, has me exceeding my allotment by xxx number of hours. Many in my orbit get similar letters (I’m copied on them, thus I know) with the record being a person who needed to use around 120 hours of vacation or lose it.

    Few lose it, as October is prime turkey season in Missouri. It seems turkey season is ranked in importance behind deer season and ahead of the birth of a child (for some, anyway). But getting and seeing these letters is a reminder of how we (Americans? Missourians? People in general?) do exactly as you stated and often don’t take enough time to get away from life’s irritants.

    While I intend to retire from my current employer within a year or so, my intention was not to receive one of these letters this year. I did, but just the first one. The subsequent monthly letters have not been headed my way. I took two weeks off in June and I intend to do similarly in October or November.

    Take that week off in October. Even if you sit around the house and don’t get dressed for a week, it’s worth it.

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    • Situations like yours have me wondering what my leisure life would have looked like if I had worked for a larger organization that had been more generous with time-off benefits. Good for you on not letting those accumulated hours turn into rats and a pumpkin at the end of the year!

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  10. I work in a job I now loathe, but since I’ve been there for over 15 years, I earn 5 weeks of leave annually, which is a huge benefit (plus I get comp. time for working long days, which I do frequently).  For years, when my kids were young, I had to take lots of sick and other leave and was always living on the precipice of No Leave Balances – so having that weight off my shoulders is a gigantic relief.

    The thought of going back to two weeks of annual leave (which is pretty much standard for new hires) is rather off-putting, so I put up with my job in order to get to spend more time with my family.

    This week, we took a three-week vacation for the first time.  It was wonderful.  Don’t think we’ll be able to repeat that though because my wife doesn’t earn as much leave as I do, so that stretched her a bit thin.  Like others have said above, I feel that taking time off from work is important for my mental health – I value that time greatly.

    Glad you were able to enjoy at least part of your vacation week.   I remember several occasions when I got sick just in time for a vacation week, and it’s quite a downer.

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  11. The perils of working for yourself – you get to be your own boss, but the responsibility of making enough for the payroll rests entirely on your shoulders. That discourages long vacations.

    Being able to take two weeks off – and knowing that your co-workers will take up the slack – is undoubtedly a nice perk of your second career!

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