Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The Years Keep Getting Shorter

I know many people as they age complain that the years keep getting shorter but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the eating of the end of the year by the ravenous holidays. One of my publishers sent me an email a week or so ago saying she hopes I enjoy the last days of the year. It was mid-November. Yesterday a different publisher said he wants to pay me and clear up the accounts before the year ended. It was the 24th of November.

Every year the holidays keep eating days away at each end. By rights the holidays should start 24th December and everyone should be back to work by 2nd January, 3rd at the latest. Instead you have people knocking off the first week of December and coming back mid-January. Do they really need that much time off to open a few presents and set off a couple fire crackers?

I'm really not a Scrooge but many people are not very efficient in the first place and then they stop work completely for a month and half. Even when they do come back it takes them a few days, sometimes even a week, to get caught up on things just so they can be at zero.

I think we should ban the discussion of the holidays at least until December. Am I alone in thinking like this?

2 comments:

bonita said...

The people who take a month and a half at the holidays are the same that spend 30 minutes at the coffee pot talking about who won american idol/dancing with stars. They get and make personal (long) personal phone calls during work. They are the lazy sluggards that make more work for the rest of us. We don't need to ban the holiday talk, we need to ban these clods. Working at home has saved me from going postal on members of this group. Phew!

Anonymous said...

I completely agree with Bonita. I have been working in an office for the past few months after many years of working by myself at home and I am shocked by the amount of time wasted by people chatting, texting, reading blogs online. It never ends. I go to work to work and I'm actually criticized for it.

These are the same people who book their month off in December right at the start of the year.

I don't think we need to be inflexible taskmasters in the workplace but it would be nice if there was more emphasis placed on getting the job done. To me, it seems like a waste of resources to have all these people just hanging around.

I think I need to go back to working on my own!