Catching up with myself

In which our hero regales us with a long rambling piece to record his Christmas vacation just past.

During most of this decade, the oughts of the 21st century, I worked at a tech startup in south Orange County, California. Tech startups are furious hives of activity, concerned chiefly with getting product out the door as quickly as possible to maximize profit and justify investment in same. As such, many of the more mundane aspects of running a company in the business of making money are left as second thoughts or not thought of at all, things such as tracking vacation days and sick days taken during the course of a furious year gloriously death marching to a finish line which moves further and further away.

Each year from 2002 to 2004, I would take a week’s vacation in mid to late July, depending on whether it was an odd or even year. I also took time off here and there each Spring. Each year, I would fill out official paperwork. Each year my boss would not submit the form to HR for recording slash archiving. Each year from 2002 to 2004, early in December, I would receive an email from the so-called HR director telling me I had 14 days of vacation I needed to take by year’s end or lose it. The company was run by a bunch of cheap bastards. No rolling of days for them!

The HR director wasn’t located in my office. She(?) was in corporate, across the country in the beautiful state of West Virginia. Not much was communicated to her. For reasons too numerous to recount now, there was a strong dislike and distrust towards her by those of us in the West Coast office.

As a consequence of this serendipitous lack of communication, for those years I calculated I had unofficially taken a month to a month and a half off for vacation after I added up all of my ‘unofficial’ but manager-approved time and the two weeks the HR director officially knew about. I got to really enjoy and appreciate taking the latter half of December off. It really provided me with the rest and respite I came to feel I deserved after a hard year pushing code uphill.

I was let go in March of 2005, when the company closed its doors. For the past two holiday seasons, I worked at my new company — somewhat. Who works between December 24th and Jan 2nd, really? This year I made sure to plan for the time off and with the holiday days falling on Tuesday, I was guaranteed 10 days away from work with only 4 days of vacation time used. Sweet!

So what did I do? Nothing, absolutely, gloriously nothing. Each day, I got up a few minutes later than the day previous and I went to bed a bit later than the I did the day previous. I played Blue Dragon on the new XBox 360 we got for The Boy and watched a bunch of dvds. I drank beer and wine and made Dirty Ashtrays for the alcoholics in my family when we all got together for Christmas. I made lefse for the first time in a few years. I read 4 books in 5 days. I soaked in the jacuzzi. I kissed and hugged my wife, several times we did things consenting adults do in the privacy of our bedroom. I relaxed.

All in all, time well spent.