MADER'S 'BRANTS Taking Your Vacation October 5, 2004 - So, due to events beyond your control, ya find your self sitting around one day with more vacation time on the books than God. Your boss is annoyed with you and insists you take your time or, due to a new policy he created while no one was looking, your time will vanish and you won’t get paid for it. Lucky you. On the other hand, you haven’t had two solid weeks off in years. It might not be so bad. In fact as you think about it, the idea is sort of appealing. You feel a little sense of joy enter your heart as visions of sleeping in, eating junk food and lounging around in your underwear all day for two solid weeks while watching porn dance in your head. So you set some dates to leave and pick some things to do and then, diligently, set to the task of getting everything caught up at work so you can enjoy yourself. No real point to this, is there? For my readers that have been in the work force for a while you know damn well that when you get back from being off for two weeks you will have four weeks of work waiting for you, or worse, some unholy mess that someone created in a misguided attempt to help you. Have you ever noticed how that week before you are supposed to leave suddenly every trivial mundane project in the world that your superiors can think up has to be done now? The world will end if we don’t have “X” report in triplicate. Never mind the fact that the other eleven months out of the year no one ever thinks of this stuff. Now you want time off? Now is when stupid ideas number 137 through 253 must be worked on. So you bust your hump. Your vacation is supposed to start Friday but one thing leads to another and you have to postpone it. That’s okay. You will just start your trip or whatever else ya have planned on Monday. Then something blows up late Friday afternoon. And while you work in an office of reasonably intelligent college educated people, much like a bad Star Trek episode, they are all inexplicably struck stupid all of a sudden and only you can solve the problem... Monday morning. That’s okay. You can just delay your time off an extra day. Can’t you? Here’s the sad fact: Americans are one the most overworked group of people on the planet. It’s not because we are so dedicated or such hard workers that they can’t imagine not being at the office 365 days a year. It’s that we get guilt trips and head jobs from our employers. Our time off is held in front of our faces like a carrot on a stick. The time we don’t take, we lose yet we get guilt trips when we try to leave. The only real winner of course is our employer. Slavery isn’t dead, my friends. It’s merely evolved into a more refined state of servitude. And people wonder why there are work place shootings. Lets all make a pact, my friends. Next time we all apply for time off and the boss or the head of HR gives us grief, lets drop our pants and moon ‘em. Then dance naked in the lobby. No, it’s not a particularly sophisticated form of protest. But it does get the point across. And as they send you to the hospital for observation to make sure you haven’t had a mental breakdown, ya can smile to yourself knowing you did get you time off in the end. Later, Mader