It was pointed out to me recently by a friend of mine that in the traditional work-world – you know, the one where you go somewhere you don’t really want to be to do things you don’t really want to do for someone you don’t respect – you get a two week vacation every year. Okay, sure, but what was he driving at? He went on to point out that there are 52 weeks in the year and when you divide the 2 week vacation into 52 you end up with 26. Still a blank look on my face. He further explained that working 50 weeks of the year for someone else and only having 2 weeks a year to yourself, it would take 26 years before you got one year’s worth of time that you could call your own.
Vacation time was a sham. Enough time to recharge the inner batteries – for management’s use. You can beat a dead horse but with two week’s vacation you can prop it back up at a desk and get another 50 week’s worth of status reports and project management out of it. Surely this was just more conspiracy theory; my friend had been watching too many episodes of the X-Files. So, I thought, time to investigate. Through a secret contact high in the levels of corporate management I was able to obtain a copy of the middle manager’s handbook. It turns out there isn’t actually an upper management handbook anymore – they had to stop passing them out when “Golf for Dummies” sued after finding out secretaries had been ordered (50 weeks out of the year) to make illegal photocopies and just change the cover to read “Upper Management Primer”. Anyway, I checked the index and sure enough, page 42, paragraph 1:
Vacation: Illusory benefit to help maintain productivity; to be used as incentive for massive overtime and tool for pushing up deadlines. Additional references, “Carrot on a stick” and “Pavlov’s dog”.
The reference was followed up with a subsection of preferred reading including titles like, “How to Make Your Employees Feel Guilty for Taking Vacation Time”, “101 Ways to Still Get Work from a Vacationing Employee”, and my personal favorite, “Expendable Employees – Arguments to Eliminate Vacation and Come in Under Budget”.
Oh yes, and of course, “Golf for Dummies”.