I’m still recovering from mine. These long weekends are a trap: you decide that hey, I can take a day or two off to play with a three year old or something similarly harmless, but the trick is that the work doesn’t stop flowing over the transom and through the keyhole and under the door, and suddenly you realize on the third day that you weren’t actually supposed to stop working when you find yourself buried up to the nostrils in obligations. The last couple of days have been ugly, frantic efforts to catch back up, and today I find myself back where I started, with the worst over with and just the usual accumulation of too-much-to-do.
I’m never going to fall for the myth of the long weekend ever again. It’s how they get you.
Two weeks until the semester ends. Or, that is, until I stop piling assignments on the students and the work comes home to roost on my desk (Christmas break: also a lie.)
This is a great example why I fled academia like the plague. Life’s so much better working 9-5, M-F and having a boss that has no fucks to give about your down time.
Welcome to the world of the mail carrier (which I was for 23 years) – we hated federal holidays, as all it did for us was pile on 3 days of mail to be delivered on Tuesdays, instead of 1 or 2…I got so I would rather have not had the day off at all…
It’s the way we know for whom the country is run – the oligarchy. 9 to 5 M-F is a myth, even for degreed, salaried workers, one they don’t tell you about in college. I myself was called TWICE over the holiday weekend, and was logged on and working those times. It’s expected that I’ll be monitoring email and Teams during all hours, work and “non-work”, and respond to anything that needs attention.
It’s so endemic, that it’s woven into the mythology of our society. You know the old “get a college degree to get a ‘good’ job and enjoy the American dream.” Most students rely on loans to afford college, even public ones. The mountainous debt generates a desperation for a job as soon after graduation as possible. Employers know this, so they pay you as little as they can get away with. From that point on, every salary offer will be some function of the current salary, perpetuating the process. Benefits packages and insurance coverages keep getting worse, while at the same time requiring a larger and larger portion of your salary (but it’s pre-tax, so YAY!). So you wind up trapped in a soul-crushing job to keep the health insurance, even though the copays, deductibles and coinsurance drain the last of your disposable income.
During the pandemic work from home phase, there’s virtually no distinction between “work” and “non-work” hours.
@2 I was a motorbike courier in London ,late 80s/90s ,the Fridays before a Bank Holiday (Americans call them Federal Holidays ,don’t they) were very busy .People who were headed out of London for personal reasons were hoping to get a job going their way that would at least make up for not getting paid for not working on Bank Holiday Monday .