December 21, 2018
Dear Everyone:
Being Retired is
a lot like being on
Vacation, but without the deadline.
We had a Project Manager at one time who explained to me that, in Real
Life, there was No Such Thing as Paid Vacation.
Of course, this only applied to those of us who were counted as
“staff” and didn’t get paid
overtime.
His theory was that you worked twice as hard before the vacation,
trying to get loose threads tied up. And
no one did your job while you were gone, so you worked twice as hard to
try to get Caught Up after you got back.
Nevertheless, paid Vacation was one of the Benefits of working a long
time for the same Corporation.
After working for a single year, you got two weeks (10 days) of
vacation. After five years,
that went up to three weeks.
And so on, every five years of continuous employment.
It was one of those incentives to encourage employees to stay
with the Company.
Over time I acquired more and more Vacation time, up to the cap of six
weeks, or 30 days, of paid leave.
It got to the point that I could take a week or two here, and
again there, and still have time to just relax.
In fact, I would sprinkle days on a Friday here and there
throughout the year so that, what with
Holidays, I never
went more than 3-4 weeks without a 3-day weekend.
Of course, the people in
payroll accounting hated those “one-sy-two-sy” days, because it made
their job a little bit harder.
But then I had a supervisor who pointed out that “we don’t work
for them; they work for us”.
And after that I didn’t feel so guilty about it.
On the other hand, when I had close to a dozen people working for me in
one of the larger central file rooms, I had to keep track of my own
employees, just to make sure that we weren’t understaffed with too many
people out at the same time.
I did that by getting a
calendar that showed all of the year on a single page.
Then I went to where the Map People kept their supplies.
This was in the pre-computer days when
geologic maps
were all colored by hand, at the direction of a
geologist.
Consequently, the Map People had lots of colored pencils.
I would pull a dozen or so different hues and assign a color to
each of my people.
I colored in the little squares on the calendar with each person’s color
for the days they were scheduled to be off work.
If two people would be gone the same day, I split the square in
half and filled each half with the appropriate shade.
Once in a great while, we would have more than two people
planning to take the same day off.
This usually coincided with a holiday landing close to a weekend.
One year, over five people all wanted to take the Fifth of July as a
vacation day because
Independence Day landed on a Thursday.
At the time, in January, I just blocked the date out and didn’t
worry about it much. If it
came down to a real issue, whichever persons had the most seniority
would get the date and everyone else would just sulk about it.
As it happened, by the time July rolled around, all but one
person had already traded that Friday for a more-important use of their
limited vacation time. File
room people tended to be recent hires and consequently had fewer
vacation days to part with.
My color-coding trick only hit a snag one time when a woman, “Joanne”,
found out that her assigned color was called “gunmetal gray”.
It wasn’t the color that she objected to so much as the name.
She actually went around to the other employees, trying to get
one of them to “trade” colors with her.
Finally, just to keep the peace, I went back to the Map People’s supply
room and picked out another color.
It was called “chocolate”.
In fact, it was a rather ugly shade of brown.
But “Joanne” liked the name and I kept “gunmetal gray” on
standby, just in case I needed yet another color.
As for myself, it got to the point that I always got the last two weeks
of December off. It made for
a nice Christmas present to myself.
Sometimes the best kind.
Programming Note: Things
will be very busy next week, what with the Holidays and all, so this is
the last Letter for 2018.
Everyone have a
Very Merry Christmas and a Safe and Happy New Year.
Love, as always,
Pete
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