Christmas Week at MegaCorp (vacation, years, place, problems)

[FiveLoaves]

Allow me to reminisce for just a bit.....

I was just thinking about what a great week this used to be at the Big Tech Company I where I worked. The BigWigs all had 6 or 7 weeks of vacation and could only carry so many days into next year. So they used up some days on the week between Christmas and New Years. In a building that employed thousands, there were scarcely a few hundred of us "workers" in place -- that left us pretty much to our own devices. I had a few year-end Action Items to wrap up. But at a leisurely pace. It was a glorious week of Come in Late, Take a Long Lunch and Leave Early.

I would bring in Donuts for the Skeleton Crew and we'd shoot the breeze for an hour on any number of topics. I remember a couple of times where we solved most of the Free World's Problems in those sessions.

There was an Outlet Mall nearby with Ralph Lauren, Geoffrey Beene and Nautica stores. I would take a lunch-time trip to shop for After Christmas Sales and score some pretty nice shirts.

I used to make a practice of sending one email a day on some important topic or other. I would brew up some coffee and really ponder the Subject Matter, all day if needed. My "Copy To:" was a long and distinguished list of Managers and Dept Heads, maybe a few C-Level's sprinkled in. After a few self-edits and, of course, spell check, I would wait til around 4:15PM to hit the send button. Then grab my coat and leave early -- what a pleasure to drive home in daylight after dark December commutes.

Another trick I picked up from IT was to reset the Clock on my PC -- this way I could change the time-stamp on my email clearly showing I was at my desk at 8:10am -- when I probably didn't get in til 9AM.

By the end of that Holiday Week, I was ready for a long New Year's weekend. And I had an week's vacay to carry over to boot.

[k7baixo]

I’ve been working from home for the last eight months or so. When I sent a note to the team letting them know that I’ll be out of the office for the next two weeks, one guy responded noting that he couldn’t tell a difference between when I was working and when I was on vacation. I tend to stay in touch.

Of course, the flipside of that I actually don’t work that hard anymore as I trend towards retirement. “They” don’t know that though - i’m pretty good at doing my job but, nowadays I do what I want when I want.

I’ve always said that I would retire in 2018 but my stress level is so low and my job is so easy that I’m in no hurry to pull the plug. I’ve let it known to the powers that be that I would happily take an incentive to retire. I know they want my job back east so, why make it easy on them?

I do have to fly to the Middle East at the end of this month. I had previously requested permission from my manager to fly business class because the total flight time there is about 21 hours. When he didn’t respond, I assumed he wanted me to stay within our policy. The policy says that certain managers can offer exceptions to the policy. I sent one of those managers a note and copied my manager. Within five minutes, my manager responded complaining that I should give him a heads up when I’m going to do something like that. Well, my heads up was when I asked him the first time. I did get permission to fly business class so that worked out just fine. A business class ticket from here to Germany is over $8,000 and I had to get a second ticket for the rest of the way. Outrageous.

I’ll continue to do little things to bug my manager. Hopefully, he’ll get tired of these micro aggressions or passive aggressive steps and agree to an incentive to retire. About the worst they can do is relieve me of my responsibilities until I’m eligible to retire but I have absolutely no intentions of crossing that line. Fingers crossed.

[PNW-type-gal]

Don't forget the unpaid week of plant shutdown between Christmas and New Year that you had better have saved up vacation for if you wanted to get paid....