Tag Archives: vacation

Daily Scribble

Workload before vacation

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It always seems work is extra busy right before you are about to take a long vacation.  I will be away 3 weeks for my wedding and honey moon.  There is only 1 week of work time left before I take off.  Although I have planned the vacation many months ago and schedule all my tasks around my vacation, according to Murphy’s Law things usually won’t line up nicely as expected.  In a team work, you depends on other people’s work and other people depend on your work.  I planned my deliverable to other team members around my vacation so I won’t be the bottle neck when I am away.  Somehow everything I depends comes in late, my time ended up squeezed significantly.  If I am not going away, I could just finish my work a bit later.  However when I am going away for 3 weeks, delay is not an option.  Other people are depending on my work, if I don’t deliver, they will be sitting idle.  Luckily I take a week off before my wedding to recover form the pre-vacation work stress.

I am reading an article on business week about the ethics of taking vacations.  In the article it says some people will feel guilty for taking vacation.  They think they are stealing from the company and should work non-stop everyday.  Are they nuts?  Vacation is part of the compensation of your hard work.  Why would you feel guilty for exercising their hard earned vacation.  In a modern cooperation, any employee is replaceable.  If the work load is structured right, absents form work a few weeks should not have much impact to the company.  If you are so important that you can’t leave work for a few weeks, it implies the company will be in deep trouble without you, then why don’t you get the hefty pay raise you asked for?  Taking vacation is not only good to your mental health, it also good for you career.  The company will not know how important you are and appreciate your work until you disappear form the office.  The ideal scenario is that company can feel the pain and inconvenient of your absence, but not bad enough it things start falling apart.

Daily Scribble

Vacation at home

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After over 24 hours of flying, finally I arrived at the Vancouver International Airport.  The long flight from India to Canada is though, taking off at 3a.m. make it even worse.  Usually when I take vacation, I will fly away from home and spend my times off in some where else.  This is the first time I fly back home for vacation.  I have a 2 weeks break in between my 2 months India assignment.  Life would be quite miserable if I have to stay there for 2 months continuously.  Actually it is not really a vacation, I still have to come to work in the head office.  However, comparing to working in India, going to work in Vancouver already seems like a vacation to me.

Daily Scribble

Aftermaths of long vacation

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I just come back form a 3 weeks long vacation in HK.  Every time I go to a long vacation, there are tons of aftermaths waiting me come back to deal with.  When I am on vacation, I couldn’t do laundry often.  Together with the dirty clothes before my vacation, I have to wash 4 loads of clothes, double the amount of my usual load.  Three weeks is not a long time, but my mail box is already full of bills and junk mails.  It took me quite some time to sort out my mail and to my surprise, I receive a X’mas card from an old friend.  Too bad that it is too late to send him a reply.  Thanks Lenny.  I do have internet access in HK, so I am up to date with my personal email.  However, I won’t check my work email while I am on vacation, my mailbox is really full.  It took me almost a day to clear the pile, catch up with the discussions and make response to those not so urgent questions.  Nevertheless, the most time consuming task is to catch up the last 3 issues of Economist.  On average it takes 3 hours to read one issues, so I am still at least 9 hours aways cleaning up the long vacation aftermath.