Appreciating a break

Three whole weeks off work. Unheard of. What is this insanity?

For the bulk of my working life, I've had jobs that require that I work over the Christmas and New Year breaks. For those outside New Zealand and Australia, let's give some background.

In the Antipodes, Christmas time is Summertime. (In theory) we get our best weather for the entire year across a good part of this period. For that reason, many normal businesses cease to exist for between four and six weeks. People simply stop work and go do something else.

It starts around mid-November when there's just not enough time to begin new work. People spend their time finishing up tasks from the year, planning for the next year, and if you're in, or around IT, change freeze will kick in, beginning in early to mid-December, and "thawing" by mid-January. The Covid lifestyle of 2020 and 2021 seems to have accelerated people's need to stop (work), drop (tools) and roll (off to somewhere else).

I've had a paying job, or side-gig, since I was about 11 years old. When I was in my early teens, it was a newspaper delivery round, and Christmas was always bollocking crazy. I had 250 stops on my run, and between the thrice-weekly newspaper, there would be pamphlet and advertising rounds to do. Yes, I was one of the culprits that filled your mailbox with crap. Across mid-December through till February, I would often be doing several rounds per day. There'd be the pre-Christmas advertising, then the pre-New Years advertising, then the return-to-school advertising. I probably delivered 10,000 pieces of waste paper to people's letterboxes each year. So much for environmental sustainability, right? This was the 1980's though, so we likely couldn't spell "environmental sustainability", let alone practice it.

In my mid-teens, I worked at my brothers' cabinet making factory after school and during holidays. In the early years, I did this from 0700 till 1700, then did my paper rounds after dinner. We would work right up till Christmas Eve, take the break between Christmas and New Year, then be back in the sawdust on January 3 or 4. I got some break, but not much. All of a sudden, that six-week school summer vacation seemed a joke, but I had money and got to buy new computer toys to my hearts' content (God bless the Commodore VIC-20, the Atari 800XL, 5.25" disk drive etc... seems like such a dream now.)

When I started working as an industrial electrician, I became familiar with the term "Maintenance Shut". This was the time when the operational, management and admin staff on any given site got their "stop, drop and roll moment" while the maintenance and construction guys got their gig on. At the height of it, we would work 14-16 hour days, 7 days per week, for 3 to 4 weeks. We were allowed Christmas Day and New Year's day off - all the other statutory holidays were taken in lieu. In New Zealand, we are guaranteed 4 days off at both Christmas and New Years', so every Shut season, we would all accumulate 6 lieu days, and our bank accounts would swell with the overtime work.

This continued when I became an OT (or back then, and Automation and Control) Engineer. The pace was the same, although as Health & Safety laws matured, they limited the length of a working day. Some sites allowed a maximum of 60 hours across 7 days, others allowed 72 hours - either way, 12 hour days week-on-week is not a lot different from 14-16 hour days once you slip into the routine. Further into my OT career, I would spend more and more time on projects away from home, in cheap motels, eating shit food. My standing record is 29 consecutive days of KFC burgers - not by choice, KFC was the only place still open at 9pm when I got back from site. It was a long time before I ate a KFC burger again. Strange as it may seem, I did not gain weight from this fiasco. I did however, have no need to walk, as I simply slid around on the layer of chicken fat the exuded from my pores.

Moving to management didn't change a lot in the early days, because someone had to monitor and harangue the louts under my control. Not everyone has a good work ethic across Xmas/NY shuts. Once I landed a management job where my team were professionals and only needed basic oversight, shut periods got easier - I could check my phone and email, maybe drop in on-site a couple of times, but for the most part, I was starting to experience what a real Xmas/NY break felt like.

So, now on to my 2021/2022 Xmas and New Year break. What an unusual experience. I've just had 19 straight days of leisure. What is this madness? Sure, I checked Slack and emails a couple of times per day, but NINETEEN WHOLE DAYS. I've spent so much time in my workshop, I don't want to go back into my workshop for a while! I've spent time doing all the things that I never had time to do during the year - electronics projects, programming, drawings and design - this is unheard of.

Across the last six years, I've spent my Xmas breaks juggling work and study - cramming in as much cybersec study as my brain could handle alongside whatever work I've had to do across the break. This year - not a single textbook, not a single YouTube video (or not cybersec at least), not a single course. My brain is wondering what this madness is in aid of.

I have never, in my entire career, got to day 16 of a vacation, and wanted to go back to work. I have typically found that as the end of a vacation edged closer, the fear of impending doom crept up and I was dreading that first Monday. I'm sure part of it is the company I work for, but maybe this is what vacations are meant to be like?