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Who Works During the Holidays?
While sitting here at my computer, plugging away at tending the bin,
I started wondering who else might be hard at work, instead of
enjoying what most in the world (especially in America) would consider
"the Holidays". I've stumbled into working this season for the second
year in a row, and I find myself not bothered much by it at all. If
you had asked me even 5 years ago if I would give up my Christmas
vacation for work, I would have laughed and answered with a resounding
"No!". Have any of you fallen into similar behavior? As an aside, what
Holidays do many of you find yourselves working, whether it be
Christmas, Thanksgiving, or some other Holiday, what drives you to work
when others are enjoying their time off?
We are the location that some people take their vacations. So, I'm at work.
Does school work count?
(my thesis project never sleeps)
Being a high school student......i can say i work on holidays. Not just on school schiznit but i also have a job!!!! AARGH!. Seriously, today i had to work on a project for school and also spent about 6 hours on the job. Well i work at home but still..... My dad who is self employed, worked too. I suppose it is the same type of pattern for many of those who are self employed.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&o
I find the need and want for money, more than an ample substitute to work whilst everyone is on holiday, especially if the company you work for will give you the holiday time later as well :)
SEVENTEEN (4:04)
(K. Winger/R. Beach/B. Hill)
I saw sparks fly
From the corner of my eye
And when I turned
It was love at first sight
I said please excuse me
I didn't catch your name
Oh it'd be a shame
Not to see you again
And just when I thought
She was comin' to my door
She whispered sweet
And brought me to the floor (she said)
I'm only seventeen
But I'll show you love like you've never seen
She's only seventeen
Daddy says she's too young
But she's old enough for me
Come to my place
We can talk it over
Oh everything going down in your head
She said take it easy
I need some time
Time to work it out
To make you mine
And just when I thought
She was comin' to my door
She whispered sweet
And brought me to the floor (she said)
I'm only seventeen
You ain't seen love
Ain't seen nothing like me
She's only seventeen
Seventeen
Such a bad girl
Loves to work me overtime
feels good (ha)
dancin' close to that borderline
She's a magic mountain
She's a leather glove
Oh she's my soul
It must be love
I'm only seventeen
But I'll show you love like you've never seen
She's only seventeen
Daddy say she's too young
But she's old enough for me
Its the only time I can get work done and not get bothered at work. And I was able to move my day off to New Year's Eve, so four day weekend! Whoo!
While we do get to take off everyday that the Federal Reserve is closed, Christmas Eve is not one of those, and we had to have somebody in for a few hours on Christmas Eve.
Why the Hell else would I be posting to Slashdot on Christmas, if I weren't slacking off at work?
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
only those of us that want to keep our jobs...
It might piss people off, but my job is what I would be doing if I was independently wealthy. I work during holidays because it's just too much fun to miss.!
Oil of Wormwood: because absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
For 2 years during my tech support days, I was Seanet's token jew employee. I was the only person who would work that day, manning all of the phones. In 1995, it was all worth it. Seanet is located on the 68 floor of what was then called the Columbia Tower. That day a thick fog had rolled into Seattle. When I got into the office, the view was amazing. You couldn't see the city below, but you could see the Cascades (and the occasional top of a building) poking through the clouds below. I spent the day watching that, blissfully unbothered by customers - apparently no one wanted to call an ISP on Christmas.
That said, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are traditionally covered by our Jewish colleagues.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
For once, I'm not working at all on Christmas. No cell phone, no email, no nothin except for tryin out a cool new video game with my cool new Joystick :)
Been a long time since I actually did that on a holiday.
I'm at a national ISP call center, waiting for any of the phone agents to tell me they can't figure out what's wrong with a caller's connection. Should that happen, I will swing into action, with advice, references and, if necessary, escalation to a higher tech level.
Been waiting 4 hours for something to happen....shift is half-done.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
i would be pretty pissed off if i was forced to work on the holidays, but i found myself doing a little extra work today cause i was bored
That's the thing about working in a home office. You're always at work, even if you're sick, even if it's a holiday. Especially at my home, because it's small and we're in the middle of a perpetual remodel job. My main computer and desk are not removed from the chaos of life, and so my work life and my home life are hopelessly intertwined.
It's not so bad, though. My fellow staff members are kind of like members of the family, always right there in IRC, every day.
Tina
news editor / reporter
newsforge.com
tinahdee beautiful jewelry: silver, gold, gemstones tinahdee.etsy.com tinahdee.com facebook.com/beautifuljewelry
"Holidays"... what are they?!
# man -k holiday
holiday: nothing appropriate.
Hmmm.....
I just don't know what else to do with my time. Everyone else is off with their families, or out of town on holiday. I enjoy my work for the most part, especially when I can do it without interruption, which is tougher during the week. If I were at home, I'd just be banging away on the computer.
The alternative is to go home and celebrate Christmas with mom and the sibs, but Christmas is pretty much ruined for me. I don't like the commercial aspect of it, and I don't like that mom would expect me to attend church if I went back there. I'd rather just visit on a few non-holidays, get together because we want to get together, not because it's been prescribed by the churches and every shop with lights in the window.
I put myself through college working in a Water Plant on the 3PM-11PM shift. Law dictates that the plant is staffed 7 days a week (16 hours/day for this plant). I did that for years and can't really say that I enjoyed it.
Since graduating college I have worked my way up to a network/system admin for the local community college (the one I attendded). Even though we are on Christmas break, I worked and extra day into the break for system maintenance and went in briefly on Christmas Eve to tend to a slight emergency.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Being the only jew in my town, I've found the only places that are open are the movie theater and the chinese restaurant.
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
i got out of bed and had a rant on irc. had dinner with family, then headed too the study to work on my secret coding project. there bugger all else to do, tv is 25 year old xmas special repeats. i couldn't think of a better way to spend my holiday than coding whilst listening to bbc lord of the rings (i should convert it too ogg vorbis).
I am a freelancer in Germany and I tend to work when I want. I am working at the moment, and I even worked on Christmas eve. Holiday is when I manage to get my mind free of ideas I want to realize!
Bastards...
So, obviously I have to work :)
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Usually don't work, don't really like it. Last year I went home for Christmas (Norway). This year, I'm not (going to Las Vegas for New Year, though). Only reason I'm at work is that there are stuff I wanted done before the New Year. Start the new year with a clean set of sheet, so to speak:-)
Happy Holidays, and God Jul og Godt Nytt Aar.
Je ne parle pas francais.
and as of several years ago (they seem to have changed their policys) they were open 24/7, and one store in each region was open on all the major holidays. So 2-3 years ago, I worked christmas day and new years day...it really wasn't that bad, since nobody wanted to make copies those days, I just sat around doing nothing (the people who had partied to hard the night before, were sleeping on the job). I brought some CDs w/ movies and ROMs on them, and spent the day having fun w/ my co-workers..including giving the shift supervisor a good beating, in WWF Wrestlemania for the SNES.
------ Work is so much easier when you don't
I work in a hospital. We never close. Ever. I work every other holiday and every third weekend. Its part of the job.
We are here 24/7/265. 2.5x pay helps to keep us here during the holidays.
No replies made to AC posts. Please log in.
I'm going to head into work tonight to switch some tapes for the nightly backup. I can't wait until we get our auto-changer!
:-)
Other than that and making sure the machines are all up, I don't do much over the holidays. I don't mind working, though, as long as there's enough time to spend with my family before or after work.
Systems administrators do it all year long!
Happy Holidays, everyone!
As I sit here opening presents I can't resist the distant hum of a couple nice Ultra 5's:-)
Solaris is my one true weakness..
Jeremy
Unfortunately, holidays are usually fabulous times to do server and infrastructure-type things that would normally be disruptive.
As I result I've done a LOT of server and network upgrades over Thanksgivings, Labor Days, Memorial Days, etc.
I'm sure lots of others have too.
Holidays are just usually too useful to let pass by without getting something done. In the end, the headaches saved (in lieu of turkey and mashed potatoes) are usually my own.
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
I normally get out of working, but I still end up having a pager. This year, we rotate the pager out every few weeks, I lucked out and got it for x-mas. Last year I had a pager 24/7 for months on end, and I just quietly went up to new jersey, and the pager didn't work *grin*.
Well let's put it this way, when I work on holidays, it's because I'm being paid by the hour, and paid very well.
For those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs we truely enjoy doing, it's like we're on vacation all year long!
I wish everyone would enjoy their jobs as much as I enjoy mine.
To me it would depend on the job. If i was able to work from home, for instance, working on a holiday would be no problem. Or if it was something i really enjoyed, i would gladly work on a holiday. However, if i had to do manual labor or pump gas (no offense to anyone), i would resent the work... unless i was getting paid double time of course!
AJ
-------
artlu.net
I do support for one of the core router vendors. So, the reasons for having someone work today should be obvious. It's been pretty slow, only a couple problems this morning before my shift started.
As for why I'm one of the ones working, well, my fiance is in a different state visiting her parents, what else am I supposed to do?
As one set of research grant deadlines for major U.S. Federal agencies fall early in the year (NSF: Jan 15, NIH: Feb 1), most Decembers find me plugging away.
For those of us in academia, especially on the tenure-track, "holidays" often mean "when you're not teaching and can get around to writing up your papers or grant proposals", although I'm pleased to say that I'm also getting to travel to see my family (hooray for the laptop and the spread of home broadband).
- Alan, Asst Professor of Clinical Decision Making
Us security guards have to work most holidays except for christmas, we have a lot of retail accounts that are closed today, so I was lucky enough to get the 24th off for family time, and the 25th off for time with friends. 2 days ago I let a bum keep his alcohol that we normally make them dump out, and let him sit in my car for a few minutes to warm up while I was working on his trespass paperwork. That was my good xmas deed. (Bums found in parking garages get served trespass notices on the first violation, get arrested on the second)
There's two days of the year my entire family gets together.
Thanksgiving.
Christmas Eve.
I specifically request those days off.
I'm more than happy to work on Christmas Day, New Years Eve, etc. Especially since I collect time and a half for it!
I don't drink, and don't do the bar/party scene. So I have lots of free time.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I will study and hack the Mozilla code during the weekend. Lots of bugs there to fix and take care of. Very fun.
..because the internet doesn't take a holiday.
I've been at work since 8am, and will be here for another hour (it's 7pm here..)
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
Not sure this counts but I worked this Christmas Eve...I'm also doing New Years...and my reason for this insanity is this: college. :)
miyax
I usually find myself working during my holidays, if only because they don't coincide with company's holidays. I've gotten quite used to it really, and usually just leave work a little early to get home and celibrate with the wife. As it turned out, I had off anyway this year during the Winter Solstice, so for once didn't work through it. As a pagan, I wouldn't have any problems working on Dec. 25th. I would rather that, and choose my own day off work, but I just don't have that option.
Here I sit in my DSL tech support job, supporting the multitudes of customers who are pissed because Alcatel and Efficent Networks have no official XP drivers out that we support.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The FCC makes my company (AT&T Broadband) stay open so I decided to work today. Thankfully it was an easy day. Only had 2 cable modems to go fix today...
military personnel
police personnel
fire sqads
paramedics, doctors and nurses
lots of personnel in the transport industry
lots of people in the IT/comms industry (yes, average/. user, that probably means you, among others)
people in charge of basic supplies (water, electricitiy,...)
If you compare all these groups you might find that this easy brainy job IT job in front of a keyboard yields best pay and comfort and the smallest risk. So stop whining if you have to work over the holidays - others are doing for you all the time.
+++ath0
I'm actually at home... on the VPN. Working on not one, but TWO partner websites. Due the 1st. Ayep.
And this morning? Went in and installed a brand new switch chassis, by myself. Nearly broke my hand when it slipped while I was trying to install it in the rack. But it's installed and running.
And for the record, I do celebrate Xmas too.
This post is fucking bullshit. After having tried to submit various *legitimate* posts to SlashDot during the last year, each with perfect spelling, great grammar, and insightful information, each has been rejected. But drivel like this shit gets through. How fucking lame, SlashDot moderators. Have a nice fucking holiday.
I work at a local TV station and this is only the second time I have had Christmas or any other "holiday" off. I would guess that anything that runs 7x24x365 has plenty of people that work. I don't mind the work but I do mind missing the early wake up of my young daughter.
Once an employed coder making around $70k, I am now a movie theater usher making less than $7 an hour. Movie theaters never close and considering I am 'new' compared to many of those who are far younger than I, I had to work today :(.
I know Asian restaurants (e.g., Chinese, Korean, etc.) are opened on Christmas but I think with limited hours (close earlier).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Once upon a time in a previous encarnation I was DJ, as in radio announcer/personality. Every day that didn't fall on my regular day off I worked. I -REALLY- liked Christmas [Eve] with every damn carol and jingle brought to you by the folks down at the local funeral parlor and used car lot. Bah! Humbug.
When I was a kid, I never knew when we would open presents was because my father was a firefighter who often pulled Christmas duty. Most years we celebrated a day or two early... probably because I still remember that one year we didn't....
By the time my father was senior enough to regularly have the holidays off, I was working at Disney World and low enough on the pecking order (seasonal, HS or college age) that I always worked during the peak holiday hours.
I've always found it interesting how indifferent people are to this. I'm not sure if it's a defense mechanism (against guilt), or something else. The Duke University book on Disney World even mentioned this - one researcher visited on Thanksgiving Day and noted just how disconnected most people were between their holiday and the way they treated the people who had to work.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I'd normally take Christmas off, but we received a shipment of 6 servers, 6 desktops, 2 laptops, and assorted odds and ends on the 21st, and I've got to get them all up and running before the second week of January. Besides, it's the best time to get anything done. All the users are elsewhere, have the internet connection to myself, as far as work goes it ain't bad.
Matt
Resistance is futile. You will be commodified. Attack us with ideology and we will sell it as nostalgia.
Yea,
You all may be at work rebooting Windoze servers and what-not. But I get the distinct pleasure of sitting at home dialing in (not broadband, mind you) to tend the systems over the lovely 28.8 connection while my realtives are running around talking about medical conditions and "How much spice should I add to this dish of brussel sprouts"?
So, to hell with you people at work who can escape the inevitable questions "What are you doing? shopping at that amazon.com?" and "Can you pay attention to us instead of surfing?" Surfing? Bah! I am running "mission critical" systems while you open your presents and eat your stuffing!
(She works as a Radio / Helicopter landing officer)
I was lucky and just cought the last chopper to the beach from another rig
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Since Jewish people don't work a lot of them work as normal or go and eat Chinese Food because the Chinese don't celebrate Christmas either. For more information on the Jewish faith in general and what Jewish people do during Christmas go here Hope this helps. Merry Christmas and remember the people that don't celebrate Christmas are people just like you and should be treated with kind tolerance.
But what I like the most is holidaying while everyone else is working.
Here in New Zealand this is a major time of year for holidays: the roads are packed, the beaches are packed, the shops are packed.
The office, OTOH, is peaceful. I can really get things done, I don't have to worry about dress code, and I can pump up the volume on those OGG audio streams from Radio 1 :-)
I tend to take my major holidays in a completely different time of year - May, or October, or something. The roads aren't full of lunatic drivers, everything is cheaper and quieter and I really can relax.
Merry Christmas!
programming is what I do at home or at work. the programming at home tends to be more fun - 3d at home, j2ee boooooring stuff at work.
at this point, I know I'm getting laid off soon, so I'd gladly work just to have the job.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Well I've had to work over the holidays before. Cause it is Christmas public holidays and people take anually leave during these periods, support staff tends to get a bit low...I'm a developer and sometimes I am asked fill the gap. Reason why? You get payed extra $$$. This helps with the morgage and the credit card used to purchase Christmas presents.
:P) it's only the standard lost of demerit points off your license - not double during the holiday season, the weather is nice and warm (actually it's hot) and a good excuse to "quick" trip to an uncrowded beach.
Good thing is the company I work at knows its staff and we get company paid lunches. Nothing is usually open during Christmas and Boxing Day, so they make special arrangments with caterers.
I usually take my holidays afterwards (during February - Australia season), no traffic jams up the coast, if I get caught speeding (not that I do speed
It's worth it if you don't have any family or other strict commitments.
Christmas has become less important to me... so many people just recognize it for the commercial side, but not the birth of Jesus Christ. What it originally was for. Regardless of religious believes, that's is what Christmas was intended for.
Sure, I hang out with my family and friends. I have also have a few days off. It just makes me sad to see money and greed taking away a beautiful day. I don't have a problem with gift giving, as long as you don't forget what this day is about.
God Bless.
-William
this morning i went out with no hope to get cigarettes, even indian store was closed. but then i found small chinese store and were open!
Maybe someone will post that gas stations
are also open today.
break from reading
or
break to read?
evil prof's seem to think the latter...
All xmas night, and all boxing day-night.
For a crappy extra £150 per/day.
Bah. It's turned xmas (normal a great time, as long my g/f & mum don't meet:) in to the most boring few days ever! (I have to sleep in the day, inorder to stay awake at night)
So far the most intresting thing I've don't is got part way thou. an install of FreeBSD on a 56K!!!
Now I'm at work (Systems Support Officer), the busses have stopped, so yesterday I bought a bike, not something I recomend in London), the Win2K DC is lossing passwords left right and center, some bloody email alert system will not shut up, and I don't have any change for the drinks machine!
Mlk
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
A lot of people forget that there are many americans that don't celebrate christmans. For example, my family. Coming from a Hindu background, we don't celebrate christmas or Thanksgiving. And hence, my dad being a physician often works today without a second thought.
I'm currently a college student, and hence don't work. But when I do get into the job market, It doesn't matter what particular days I get off, just as long as I get some vacation time.
What's got to suck are the pilots/flight attendants/airport employees that are helping my mom come home today and they can't celebrate holidays even if they wanted to.
I work in a nondescript federal building in Boston, a 24-7 facility, monitoring data communications for the FAA. We were still operating on 9-11. Needless to say, I'm at work today. =)
BTW: For those of you who enjoyed the Norad Santa website, we're the ones who feed them (NORAD, not just the santa site) commercial flight data.
As a Christian, I stopped doing Christmas many years ago when it became evident (Christmas lights on the local Sikh temple) that Christmas had nothing to do with Christ and everything to do with $$$. As a non-conforming consumer, I find it simple to resist the annual guilting that comes from my non-Christian family and friends. I buy them gifts unexpectedly during the year and give of my time to them whenever they need me.
I've worked many Christmas days in the past, but this year I actually have it off as a paid holiday. I'm enjoying the time off, examing the life of Christ in the scriptures and celebrating his death, the part of his life that has meaning for all of us. Why celebrate his birth, a time when none of us, including Christ, have achieved anything worth celebrating.
Nowhere in the bible does Christ ask we celebrate his birth. He does ask that we remember his death though.
1 Corinthians 11:20
23 For I received from the Lord that which I also handed on to YOU, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was going to be handed over took a loaf 24 and, after giving thanks, he broke it and said: "This means my body which is in YOUR behalf. Keep doing this in remembrance of me." 25 He did likewise respecting the cup also, after he had the evening meal, saying: "This cup means the new covenant by virtue of my blood. Keep doing this, as often as YOU drink it, in remembrance of me." 26 For as often as YOU eat this loaf and drink this cup, YOU keep proclaiming the death of the Lord, until he arrives.
Again, Christmas does not now and never has had anything to do with true Christianity. We can thank the Roman's and the pagan druids for our current holiday, which combines tree worship- (Germany), winter solstice (druids) and the Roman Saturnalia into a bastardized holiday that has been co-opted by corporate American interests starting in the late 19th century (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan et al.)
So, have a happy Walmart day and enjoy your plastic products. See you in the new year.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
I'm a biology professor. Just because it's Christmas doesn't mean the animal colony doesn't need to eat; it just means there aren't any student workers to help out.
Also, I've got 100 cell biology exams to plow through -- grades are due on Thursday.
Job 1: The internet doesn't shut down during the holidays.
Job 2: The radio doesn't shut down during the holidays.
Although, I'm probably the only person who is an "ultra-cool" DJ by day and an "uber-1337" nerd by night.
to many of us in academia, holiday season means that we're free from doing work for other people, and finally having some time to do work that we want to do but haven't had the chance to do yet. finally... free from classes so that i can do research!
L'etat n'a pas besoin des savants.
- Robespierre, refusing clemency for Lavoisier
The security people who keep all that expensive computer hardware we all love so much from becoming another crime statistic.
And bear in mind - the security guards you see are probably not getting paid nearly enough to miss out on all the family and social aspects of the season, because they're not really given a choice in the matter.
C
--
Democracy would work just fine if people weren't so goddamned stupid.
I've at least come into work on Xmas day for the last 20 years, usually quite early (e.g., 5am) in the morning. It's become something of a tradition, and the only day of the year that I can guarantee no one will phone me with a problem!
I'm always willing to work Christmas Eve and Christmas, as long as I can get my Pagan holidays off...the Solstices, Equinoxes, and Cross-quarter days (those inbetween the Solstices, Equinoxes).
Blessed Be, and Brigit Bless
Farrell McGovern,Druid.
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
This is the first holiday season in years that I haven't worked either Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or both (The norm). Usually though it's somewhat out of choice, I also haven't had many decent months of December the past few years, so working took my mind off life :) This Dec has just been slow for a change, and the lack of work to do today has just left me bored. Relaxing perhaps, but very little else. To be honest though, working the holidays dosen't bother me normally. I simply don't have anything better to do with my time. Only occasionally am I able to spend the holidays with the people I'd like to, so the rest of the holidays it's simply rather pointless.
... because I've got my priorities straight. :)
I am Rudolph of Borg.
...letting your govt import all that cheap and desparate labot in the form of 3rd world tech workers...dumbasses!
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
I'm in the same boat - I work at Copper Mtn in Colorado doing telecom/datacom/misc IS stuff. I've always wondered what kind of a freak family gets together to ski on Christmas, but there seems to be enough to fill all of our lodging.
I heard Little Cottonwood canyon got dumped on, how's the snow? What resort are you at?
PS. Wanna trade comp passes?
----- obSig
fa rah rah rah rah rah rah rah rah
Christmas is just one of those religious holidays. Since I have nothing to do with any religion whatsoever, on this day I do whatever I want - I am at work at the moment.
Do I mind working "holidays"? No, not really. Time is an illusion, and at lunchtime doubly so. My family and I alter our holiday observances as needed to fit our schedules. Just because it is December 25th doesn't mean anything.
Being single, alone, and having no family within 400km, I prefer to work. Major holidays tend to suck for me, since I have no one to share them with...
Anyways.. I'm working Graveyard shift for HP Phone support. Ah, the joys. It should be REAL quiet tonight. Although, there are those people who JUST got a HP computer, and can't find the ANY key.
-- Karma is for people who think they matter.
How comes there isn't more people choosing beard? Christmas is about the only time of the year I can go around not shaved. Before and after christmas, it's part-time job (school doesn't require shaving) and during the summer it's the full-time job.
So enjoy that long beard, 'cause it wont stay there very long.
As I learn more and more, I realize I don't know much.
I got lucky, doing network operations on the evening shift in a high-availability 24x7x365 shop for 6 years. "The Holidays" were my best time for making overtime pay, taking shifts for people with kids, or who were on trips.
It earned me the brownie points to be able to take days off the rest of the year without anyone hesitating to say "yes" even when I wanted things like 4-day weekends.
But I'm Japan now. Dec. 24 is the Emporer's birthday, so Monday was a holiday, but Dec. 25th is just another day.
However, NewYears is a really big thing here. For three days there is actually almost nothing open for business. Not stores, not restaurants, not offices, banks, whatever. It's amazing! It's really a good idea to stock up on food, unless you like rice-balls from the local AM-PM which is the only thing open.
But we're back to work on the 4th (Friday), back to normal. A one day work week! I wonder how long it will take them to legislate a one-day work week in France?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Network operations centers, 24x7, year round.
Router monkies around the world are working tonight to make sure your 'net connection stays up.
Like Annie said: It's a hard NOC life.
Does moderating Slashdot count as work?
Guess you get your fair share of Homer Jokes, but thanks for the hours you put in.
Amazon.com Customer Service... we never sleep...*snooze*
I'm in the US Coast Guard, and I've worked 2 out of the last three christmas's (I hope I plurarlized that right).
If I had a choice, I'd be home with my wife as its her first christmas away from her folks. Merry Christmas (and Happy Holidays) to all the other military personnel, netadmins, sysadmins, and every other *admin out there working on this time for joy.
Merry Chrstmas
ET3 William J Kenny III, USCG
Eric... You suck...
I find myself on call 24x7x365. I'd of course rather have "the holidays" off to spend with friends and family.
I've had to work on new years eve before, as well as thinnksgivung. Fortunately I've never had to work on X-mas. That is one day I insist on having off (although I am on call).
nb
There is neither night nor holidays on the net as a whole. NetOps is the glue that holds this web together.
I remember a day when our entire NetOps team got scheduled to be in a class together. It was the only time it happened, and "Network Engineering" and "Server Engineering" had to take over for the day.
It was amazing! Our Sparc2 work stations were upgraded to Sparc10's within days, and never again was a request by our manager for additional hardware or support delayed, much less refused!
All it took was that little reminder that the guys in the glass room really, really do have a job to do.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Instead I'm spending this joyous holiday studying for a big exam tomorrow.
So cheers, and happy holidays to everyone!
I have to work every day BUT Christmas and New Years during Dec - May. Next holiday: Memorial Day at the end of May. On the flip side, the job is very enjoyable ( programming C++ ) in an unusually good environment ( private office with a door that closes, almost no meetings ). So, even tho I have to work Christmas eve and New Years eve, it's fine!
This year I was lucky enough to spend Christmas Holiday with my parents, and my grandmother. I had a nice home-cooked meal, and enjoyed the company of my family.
Last year I was at home by myself and spent Christmas online. The year before I was working. I guess I don't realy care about the Holiday or getting into the 'Christmas spirit'. It never really meant a whole lot to me anyway.
I guess I'm just saying that if you get to spend some time with your family -- it can be good. Someday when your parents and grandparents are gone you might miss them and wish you could see them again.
Besides... free food shouldn't be missed!
Right now we got over 150 Techs staffed in this one location. 100 are waiting for calls, 30 are taking calls the rest are on breaks, the avg wait between calls is 1/2 hour (normally its like 3 minutes)
no one can figure out why we are "over staffed for xmas"
how are our colleges at HP, Dell, IBM and (ugh) gateway staffed tonight?
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Christmas is now officially over (at least, in many timezones), so in the spirit of the holidays I announce: Let the terrorist attacks resume!
...
My *god* people,
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My friend works at a Home Depot, and she had to be in until 6:00 yesterday. Christmas Eve. Who the hell buys bathroom tiles on Christmas Eve?
I'm here at work for some 88 billion dollar company that says theyre into Linux....yet I am here always working with Winblows, Sloaris, and Axe...
Being here, making certain the money trees are well watered, is theyre reason for having me work! I was here thanksgiving....christmas-eve and day and I'll be here New years eve and day.
I worked at a casino as a cashier for nearly two years. The worst part of the job was not getting holidays off. It's not that I cherish holidays or family time, but working the same days without any of those bonus days off that holidays represent it leads to quick burnout. Plus casinos are typically busier during the holidays, so I had to work even harder.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
It's so true, during the holidays we tend to do server backups, software/OS upgrades and you name it. Things are too hectic to go on vacation (note, I didn't say holiday). In addition to that, places I need to go are often too costly to get to (trust me > $1,400 roundtrip). If I go at what are considered lesser/non-holidays (e.g. Easter, Chinese New Year, Ramadan), things are way cheaper then and work is routine, such that there is someone else or lesser trained to do the task.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
"I started wondering who else might be hard at work..." keep your perverted thoughts to yourself.
I did the Waffle House cook thing for 2.5 years, and when they say they're open 24 hours a day 7 days a week, well they also mean 365 days a year. Three Christmases I worked. You get paid double time, so it's not totally uncompensated. Personally I was always amazed at how crazy busy Chrismas is at the Waffle House, even on the third shift.
RFC2119
The fact that Christmas is a national holiday is a violation of the seperation of Church & State, IMHO. I would much prefer that everybody was given a 'floater' day off, which you could use for whatever holiday you celebrate (Jewish holidays suck up as many as 13 vacation days some years (no, I do not get 13 vacation days)).
Yes, I worked on Dec. 25. Being Jewish, it was just another Tuesday.
Haaaa Haaa
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
When I was younger, 19 through 28 or so, I used to work the holidays to let the people who had families have the time off to spend with them (and get the extra pay). Then after I got married I would work the occational holiday to get the extra pay. Once my son was born I didn't work holidays unless it was something critical. Now that my wife is my ex-wife, well, when I have my son I am home with him. When it's her turn to have him I work, like this week.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
I am suprised no one mentioned the Euro, I work for a Bank in Ireland and althought no one is working tonight. The are people in the rest of the holidays. The way some people are going on about it you would have thought somebody just happend to mention to them about it on Friday. We aren't Even one of the major banks here so I would have thought all across Europe more People will be either working or oncall. More in line with what happened for Y2K than a normal festive season
Heh... I'm not working, I'm reading slashdot... and uploading yet another cartoon.
Joy to the world, and Happy Holidays folks
One year in particular, when we didn't have any babysitter for our then-young son, I was in the office on Christmas and New Year's and weekend days so that I could be home on weekdays. I had the flexibility and the 24/7 access; my wife's job didn't.
I've worked holidays lots of times, for many of the reasons others have mentioned - system support, coverage, etc. I've found it the best way to get things done. Working Labor Day, say, so I can take off another day, one has no interruptions and can concentrate. Plus it can be a handy swap - I'm Jewish, and don't mind covering Christian holidays or Sunday, while I want to be out on Saturday and the Jewish holidays. One benefit of a pluralistic society - we can all cover for each other.
I have been self-employed most of my career now, and I try to minimize the amount of time off that I have. Right now, I haven't got any full-time gigs, and I would much rather have been working than sitting around the house today.
Besides, not everyone is Christian.
--
See my custom-made Concealed-Carry Holster
--
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
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I mean, it's the only day you can actually get something done. Nobody to bother you, no distractions. Just you and the machine.
Plus, most employers should give you a comp day, so you can take vacation when you actually want to.
Can your IM do this?
C'mon, slashdot. I don't have time to read all this frufru crap while at work. Give me something to wank over (that Jessica Alba story was great!) or something to keep my mind occupied (MORE STORIES ABOUT SLUG-EATING ROBOTS PLEASE.)
Seriously.
I want to go home.
As long as i have coffe in my cup i work.
i dont care about these jesus guys anyway.
main()
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
Don't forget the people who are making sure that the power plants stay running... everyone would be lost without electricity.
I provide Sound & Lighting systems for Live events all over the North Alabama area. In my line of work I work on almost every holiday and weekend. My days off are usually Monday>Wednesday. And actually I really enjoy it, seems like I'm always at a party...
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
but since I don't celebrate Christmas, it's not like I'm feeling terribly deprived! :) I still got to see some great relatives (some not seen in more than a decade) a few days ago, and hope to take some of my family to LotR tomorrow, and I'm happy to enjoy the fruits of enforced togetherness feelings that certain people have forged tangential to the actual religious roots of Christmas. (Pagan celebrations co-opted, blah blah blah, that may be true but it doesn't mean the origins aren't Christian ...not something I care to argue about or dwell on! :) )
Last week, I even got to hang out with a nice subset of the incredibly smart people I know through work, and missed several others. All for it. People should get together more often to play games and converse, ones who work behind computers all day especially.
The more legitimately a holiday can be celebrated with a few joyous fireworks, though, the less inclined I am to miss it. This means that New Years I will surely see some pyrotechnics, and Hallowe'en, April Fool's, Guy Fawkes Day, Dia de los Muertos, Bastille Day, the 4th (of course) and a few others are on my list for not sitting behind my laptop while there are fuses to be lit. If I take up religion, perhaps I'll start a good (loud) Christmas tradition with which my (hyothetical) children can piss off the neighbors.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I do keep an eye on my boxes remotely all the time. I also will work a bit later this week, since I can get stuff done with no one around.
Also, I will take a long lunch and go see LOTR for the 4th time.
Well, I actually work on the holidays as much as I can even though I don't get special pay for it like some do. I simply have nothing else to do. If I take vacation I end up sitting at home staring at my computer screen all day. So I figure, if I'm going to be doing this, I may as well go to work and get something useful done while doing it (staring at the screen ya know).
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
if it wasn't for them you'd have a nice case of dysentery right about now....
Thank those that give up their holidays to make sure your drinking water is safe.
(and using chlorine to do it! in your face earth-freaks! without chlorine people with immune defencecy problems wouldnt be here, they'd be dead.)
Have you seen the economy recently?
At [insert name of just about any multinational] we got told about a project that'd normally take two months that's due out early in the new year. When it was pointed out that that was only five working days from then, the response was, "Well, they've got two weekends and their Christmas holidays."
A year or so ago, geeks had all the power. If you anounced that you were going to take unpaid vaction at the last moment, they could hardly stop you as there was no way they could afford to lose you. Now the tables have turned and management know there's no way we can afford to lose them - hence the unspoken expectation that we cover.
The one consolation is that there are generally longer periods of prosperity than recession. Until then, while it's what they want you to think, just remember that working Christmas is a lot better than not working Christmas. Now... did my boss leave his office unlocked? <evil grin>
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g g o / \ \ / \ o a \ a t `. : t s` \ s e \ / / \\\ -- \\ : e x \ \/ --~~ ~-- \ x * \ \-~ ~-\ * g \ \ .--------.___\ g
o \ \// ((> \ o
a \ . C ) ((> / a
t /\ C )/Merry\ (> / t
s / /\ C) Xmas! (> / \ s
e ( C__)\___/ // _/ / \ e
x \ \\// (/ x
* \ \) `---- --' *
g \ \ / / g
o / \ o
a / \ \ a
t / / \ t
s / / \/\/ s
e / e
x x
* g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x * g o a t s e x *
Seriously, most European countries have two Christmas days (plus Christmas Eve) for a total of three days break minimum. The extra day is the whole "Second day of Christmas" (I'm sure you heard that in a oh-so-famous Christmas song).
Im at work now, worked christmas eve, christmas, thanks giving, working New Years Eve, if its Mon-Fri., I'm working.
/. ^_^
Of course I should be working now instead of wasting time reading
Why? Simply because the atmosphere is more relaxed! It's like those days back at school when perhaps a school bus crashed or lots of other kids didn't turn up cuz of snow.. Sure it sucked to be in school but the day was different. The work you had to do was generally easy, and you got to have fun in a smaller group.
Working on Xmas means fewer pointy haired bosses to worry about, and hopefully some overtime $$! It's all good!!
mogorific carpentry experiments
bored bored bored bored bored bored bored bored.... stupid tech support job
As someone who has 3 technical jobs, I take advantage of EVERY day off I get from one of them. But someday, when I have a life again, I want to cook Xmas dinner, get drunk on New Years Eve, and have a Birthday party. Either that, or invent a device that lets me freeze time and work "offline".
I don't know which is worse, having to work a shift on a holiday or being on-call. Working a shift you know when you can be with friends and family. On-call you never know when you might have to leave, or how far you can travel. I prefer working a shift, but others say the odd of being called when on-call is slim so they like that. I don't know.
I work for IBM's number one IGS account, Federated Systems Group... The Federated Deparment Stores... you might have heard of them... Macy's, Bloomindales, Bom Marche.. etc. Anyway, I work on the Mainframe help desk, and we are open 24x7x365. I choose this to work rather than to work new year's so I could party a little. (Don't get me wrong, I miss my family, but hey, I'm only 26 once.) It's actually, very slow... no calls hardly at all, thank God. The only thing we really have to do is administrative duties so it's going to be boring... but I don't care.
||| I still can't believe Parkay's not butter.
back when i was single, i liked to work holidays. i found that i could A) get more done since no one was there, B) goof off more because i got more done (and because no one was there), and C) enjoyed the gratitude of my coworkers enough that they didn't mind granting me other, seemingly odd times off (for war practice or camping trips or war-and-camping trips). now that i have a 'traditional career' the place where i work is completely closed and i couldn't go into work if i wanted to, which is fine since i have two wonderful little boys and a digital camera to record all their holiday smiles.
heidi
love&peace
Sometimes people just have no life, or they maybe have a reason to not like the holidays and prefer to work. Maybe this person feels its more productive while others are in holiday hiatus.... Who know.... But I say there is no point is wasting a free holiday..... heck... its you're life, waste it (or not) any way you please.
I once had to work from xmass-eve all the way to new years day in a tech support call center. Thing is that was the y2k holiday, and actually the phones were dead on the 1st, but that was a Sunday, after the big party... I worked like 10 days straight... and had the 2nd off. Thing is that the 2nd was a Monday, the first one after y2k. To make this story short, I got fired on the 2nd because I would not come to work as they were short staffed, and Monday was when they got slammed with too many calls. I hadn't had a day off in over 10 days, and had worked OT all that time, and the 2nd was my only day off for the entire holiday. But I was a contractor, and this was a Microsoft windows 98 call center. The manager was mad that I refused to come into work, and since I was a contractor, I think you get the picture. I would have done anything to get a day off for the holiday, even after the holiday was over... even if it meant losing my job.
However, now I'm a Unix admin now, and I would say that going to work on a holiday would be kind of nice since I wouldn't have to deal with the annoying co-workers, who only serve to distract me. I say that I get more productive work done when the office is vacant, except for me... and to top it off... the holidays really are not that cool... you waste money, and it's the same old affair each year... work isn't so bad....
I guess the moral of the story is that the holidays are special for people who have to work hard, and especially important to the people who have to work on the holidays, like the service industry... However... put a person in a situation where they have holidays off, and salary, and working on the holidays doesn't seem so bad.... Considering the alternative... boring holidays. =)
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
Petroleum Transfer Engineers, Technicians, and Specialists such as I get stuck working the holidays, also.
Translation: Working at a full service gas station sucks.
=)
Family Wins.
The End.
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
My brother's a security guard at a hotel. He's worked on Christmas for the last few years (5?). It's nice because it's usually an excuse for us to leave family parties early (since we travel about 150 miles every year to visit family).
Anyone running a telecommunications company has one or more NOCs running 24 x 7.
I spent 5 years of my life working night shifts in military NOCs and I pretty much worked every possible holiday (at least we got comp time). Then I spent the next 3 years doing the same for a civilian satellite communications company in the US. Worked night shifts all holidays and no comp time. Damn them.
I used to like the peace of working nights but it eventually drove me insane and to this date I refuse to take a NOC job even if they offer me twice as much as I make now. It has been 2 years since I left the last NOC and my sleeping patterns are still messed up.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
*yawn* Twelve hours on the air on the 24th....
/.
:-)
Nine more tonight into the 26th....
I get to tell everyone that it might snow. And read
Bliss.
Radio never sleeps.
I was able to get two deep fried tacos today from a crew of two that was working at my local Jack in the Box today. I was very thankful for their presence.
Outside an Afghanistan hospital, US special forces/linguists are standing by hoping to question any of the 8 people making their final stand - if only they would surrender.
Intelligence agencies are hard at work today.
Here in Europe, we're getting a new currency next week. And gosh darn it, that mean's that I've got to be in work. For the last few weeks, I've needed to be in from 3am every day, and that'll continue until the end of the year. The bright side is we'll have a cool, new pan-European currency at the end of it.
It's funny how you don't appreciate how much work goes into changing a currency until you've got to update the software on tens of thousands of terminals across Europe.
Of course, this is a once-off. It'll never happen again. Just like the night of 31-12-99 that I spent in front of a bank of computers.
Japanese like to have gifts an decorations on Chrismas, but it's work as usual. 24th was only a holiday, because the current emperor's birthday was on Sunday (then this would-be-public-holiday is shifted to the next working day).
25th and 26th is no change from other days. Maybe 20% less people on the subway in the morning.
Harald (from Tokyo)
I work at a theater in colorado, it is a discount theater so it isn't that busy on christmas, so we close for the day. I find myself coming here anyway, it is becoming somewhat of a tradition. some of my friends get together and watch movies, i suppose it is just to get away from family- not that they are that bad just being around them too long ya know... I supposed that I am not the only one that kinda feels that way, every holiday we all seem to gather here.
"Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" -Homer Simpson
I work during the holidays. Sysadmin for a small company who has to get a report finished by Jan 1st. Guess who gets to deal with irate number crunchers.
but the $$ is decent and its a relatively cush job.
I work in a hotel (in vegas), and although i have the day off, i know there are people who have to work today. i also know that the casino is open as well.
I work for an Unnamed Telco Conglomerate performing Level 1 admin tasks for gobs of Unix boxen. It's a 24/7 shop so someone has to be here. I do it because they pay me double. Who can argue with that? Also, I dont have a family really so it's just another day only with double pay and less hassle because no one is using the boxes and breaking things. =D
"the smaller the mind, the bigger the noise it makes"
Close to the product tapeout, ASIC designers work basically around the clock, with some irregular breaks for sleep. During non-business hours I usually do this from home, VPNing using my @Home connection. However, after my cable provider have moved to their own network recently, the connection became unusably unstable. So this year I have an excuse to relax a little bit and spend more time with the family.
Our schedule, however, takes Chinese New Year into account, because all the Far Eastern fabs shut down for 2 weeks for it.
I would have had Christmas day and New Year's day off, but I don't celebrate Christmas (being Jewish and all). So I worked Christmas. I was able to get a lot of work done without having to go to pointless meetings. Plus, I get another day of my choice off. I chose this coming Monday, so I turn a Weekend+Tuesday vacation into a 4 day weekend. Not a bad tradeoff.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Seven springs rental. I worked 4 hours on Christmas, after 2 hours of skiing, still had 2 hours for mom, 2 for dad, and 2 for a second family get together. Now its 10 pm and I normally don't go to bed til 2am at the very earliest. SOOOO much time in a day if you don't mind puting the energy in it.
Yeah I'm almost done with CMU with a scientific computing degree(also I get world changing ideas years before other people implement), and I'm working at a ski resort for minimum wage. I have my reasons... Mainly its to meet people.
God spoke to me
The only folks who came in to work here today were hard-core christians (folks who see christmas as the pagan holiday it came from) and an atheist (that's me!).
The milder christians, jews, agnostics, etc. all were more sensible and took the day off.
My employment was terminated prior to the holiday season. I am hoping the winter hiring freeze begins to thaw soon.
I always negotiate my holidays off whenever I interview for a job. Since I'm Jewish, the holidays are never given off, but everything is negotiable.
Steve
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
Notwithstanding the fact that I'm currently unemployed - looking for a spot - I don't mind working over the holidays. It's usually the only time I can get any real work done!
:-)
Besides, I'm in *I*T* We *always* work on the holidays, or 2 am... Gotta upgrade those things sometime
The only holiday I hate working on is New Years - I try to get to where I want to party by 4pm, and then stay until the 2nd... Avoid all the crazy drunks (and give myself a chance to sober up too...)
Tech support, baby... when end users' magic boxes break, we gotta be here to fix em 24x7x365.
Some good points you raise. I caught myself almost hoping for this holiday disruption to come to an end... we have offices in San Jose, Toronto, London and Hong Kong so you can imagine the work around the clock and the effort keeping track of everyone's holidays. When I just found myself regretting the holiday, that was kind of a wake-up call. I do not really want a coronary at 43 (I'm 42 now).
So... although I do not mind working this day or any other day, I am going to sit back and enjoy a few days off, really off. I shall not even check my email, my blackberry, my cell phone. I'll work on my private web site instead. Happy holidays; everyone!
Mike
---
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WHOIS query result:
________________________________________ The NIC.UK Registration Host contains ONLY information for domains
within co.uk, org.uk, net.uk, ltd.uk and plc.uk. Please use the whois
server at rs.internic.net for Internet Information or the whois server
at nic.ddn.mil for MILNET Information.
Is it only coincidence that this falls on the second anniversary of the Hotmail/Passport outage that gave Michael Chaney his fifteen minutes of Slashdot fame?
And all the other servicemen.
As an prior Security Force Marine I can't remember the number of holidays I spent in a guard shack. We used to draw little christmas trees and tape it to the bullet proof glass. It was against regulations but every year it seemed to get overlooked.
A few Years ago I remeber hearing the base commander had driven all over camp Pendelton on christmas eve and brought a mug of hot Chocolat to every Marine on guard duty. There were probably to many for him to get them all, but the fact he took time out of his holidays to do that was something many of the marines never forgot.
Semper Fi to all the Marines and other service men and women out there.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
Dear A.C.,
Unfortunately, basic personality traits come through in writing style quite clearly, and very quickly.
If these three A.C. postings were actually made by the same person, which seems likely since they're of the same style, you can be mostly assured that you would not in fact ever be an employee of mine.
Self confidence is a good trait, it leads to success. Arrogance overlayed on stupidity usually leads only to profanity.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
i'm on call for the North/Central/South American portion of our global data network. My pager hasn't gone off once today, which further re-affirms my belief that any time I get paged for a down circuit, it's because of human error...all the people making mistakes are on vacation. ;-)
Though I'm sure hackers work on holidays too, and I wouldn't dream of intentionally insulting either group!
I am not sure if I can put myself in this. After joining the schoo, i found myself working for other random things than for my own research. Unfortunately I am the only computer geek and rest of them are click click win2000 users. But simulation softwares run on unix machines. So our advisor got 10 new unix boxes and asked me to get it running before new year eve. And so here I am amongst ten blade 1000 machines, configuring and setting them up.
I hope I dont end up as a unix administrator even after earning a Dr. before my name. If everything else fails I will move to north pole and join Santa.
Many of us can remember working through many holidays during 1999 -- single handily holding off impending doom from the evils of Y2K...I think since then people have just figured that us "computer nerds" don't mind putting in a few extra hours over the holiday.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
these guys are either really busting thier asses to get back on-line or are blissfully clueless as to the problem. They're noexistant as far as a domain goes. looks like it wasn't a very merry X-Mas for them...
Just Limin' Mon
Same for doctors, cops, firemen, etc.
Oh wait, you meant only geek jobs that don't get the holidays off? Picky picky. :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
For 25 years I missed Thankgiving, Christmas, Labor Day, and Easter, but starting in 2001 I "just said no" - ya know what? Management didn't even blink. They made arrangements for me to do it during "normal" times like all the other employees - and I don't feel a BIT guilty...
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
I'm in Turkey, where it isn't a holiday, so I'm working. Actually, they would've given me the day off, but since my family isn't here, there wasn't much point.
A few weeks ago was Ramadan, where observant folks fast during daylight hours. At the end of that was 3 days of Bayram, which is when people go around visiting family and friends. Bayram is a non-work holiday, but I work in a data center, so it was work as usual.
As a note, Muslim holidays are based on a lunar calendar, so they don't come at the same time every year - sometimes Ramadan is during the summer. So you can't really assume that December is a holiday pretty much everywhere.
-- Sigs are for losers
I work for a news paper company. We never stop producing the paper. Our company will continue to try and get some kind of paper out even if we had hurricanes, riots, nuclear war you name it.
The company I work for is open for tech support 24/7
Two come to mind immediately:
... we oversold that item, sorry. Oh yeah, there's no more left in the district." He told me that one guy actually brought the Sears worker over to his son and said "See him Son? He ruined Christmas for us."
1) People at warranty companies. NeW (the company that OfficeMax and Best Buy go through) and GE all boast 24/7 technical support on many items (printers and scanners, etc.) Obviously there needs to be someone there to pick up the phones. I have a friend that used to work at technical support and he would tell the usual horror stories, the usual idiotic customers and the usual rude customer. I'm not sure if customers tend to be better or not in Christmas, it could go either way (the stress from the holiday season and the product not working could cause rude customers, but then again the cheer and joy of the moment may cause more understanding customers... it could be a wash).
2) A job at a wearhouse or major department store.
This is a job I do not envy at all. I know a guy who works at Sears. People go there and buy large items for their families (usually sons or daughters) but pick them up later. Of course, Sears oversells all of these products, so on Christmas Eve when these customers come back to pick up the product they already paid for, its HIS job to tell them "oops
That's some messed up shit.
I worked in retail.
I worked at Price Club, then PriceCostco, then Costco.
XMas was a dark horrible time filled with dark horrible people who sucked the life from my weary, heavy heart.
Some of the bastards worked me like a rented mule even though was struggling through finals and others were hideous pod people sprouted from Hell to shop and bust balls. The rest was 'bicker without ceasing' family.
Now I actually have a job where the boss comes into my office on the 20th and says, "Jesus Christ Lou, go home, and don't come back until the third!"
Alas this year he and his marketing wife had their first baby a few days before X Mas so I have to work tomorrow.
That aside I really love the holidays now. Especially the part where my 2 year old boy hands me his homemade thing-a-ma-bob and says, "I _do_ love you daddy!"
This
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I certainly don't mind the work, although Xmas time has taken on a whole new meaning when compared to the same time while I was in college.
I am scheduled to work by my Employer (Scrooge Still Lives). Merry Christmas To All.
I work at a newspaper, and, there is never a day when the paper doesn't run, and thus people are here every night, Christmas or no.
No choice for firefighters either...
Unfortunately people don't stop "accidentally" crashing their cars or setting their apartments on fire.
We don't get extra pay, it's just another 1/365.25th. But we do get to hang around eating pie between calls!
Thanks to all who've shown their support this difficult holiday season.
I directly accessed The Register using their IP address (213.40.196.64) and found that the server was still up, but that the home page carries a last update timestamp of 24 December at 15:29 GMT—over a day and a half ago.
...
% 241%40FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.edu.tw&output=gplain
So not only has the domain name been detagged, it appears that the site itself has gone into hibernation as well. Does anyone have any other information about what's going on over there?
EXTRA: I found this excellent post on Usenet, and append it here for your edification:
From: Anthony Edwards (anthony@catfish.nildram.co.uk)
Subject: Re: some one does not like THEREGISTER.CO.UK
Newsgroups: uk.net
Date: 2001-12-25 14:04:27 PST
On Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:09:06 +0000, in uk.net Rob Harvey <nospam@ukservers.net> wrote:
>
>What's also interesting is that the whois doesn't show a "Registered on" date
>which I believe means the name itself is pre-nominet and didn't have an expiry
>date.
>
The Register's first issue was Number 1, 25 July 1994 (Nominet began in 1996 I believe). In those days it was an email newsletter, the first issue can be viewed at:
http://194.159.40.109/reg1.txt
In fact, issues 1-37 can be viewed at the above site, simply by placing the relevant issue number in "reg*.txt".
However it appears that, at least up until 8 November 1996 (issue 37), the domain name theregister.co.uk was not in use. Indeed, the site was at http://www.hubcom.com/register/ , although it seems that John Lettice and Mike Magee also at that point owned the domain theregister.com (albeit they don't now).
One wonders what has happened to theregister.co.uk to cause the domain to become detagged. It is hard to believe that it is a simple financial matter, given the relatively small sums involved. I notice that the identity of the person who apparently requested the detagging (presumably via the Nominet Automaton) is an employee of uk.psi.com. Since all such detagging requests (from Nominet members to Nominet) have to be PGP signed, one imagines that request at least was genuine (but see below).
Up until around September 2001, The Register's hardware was co-located at one of Level 3's UK facilities. Following a variety of technical problems relating to Cisco load balancing equipment, the site was moved I believe, although I am unable to remember who the new hosting centre is. I have a sneaking suspicion that it *is* now PSI, in which case I imagine there will be much embarrassment all round.
On the other hand, there may be a little more to it. The Register have roundly slated the bulk email operation behind the recent Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines spam incidents, pointing out in no uncertain terms (and to Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines too, one imagines) that the email addresses used were definitely culled from Usenet.
However, consider this:
>Received: by jupiter (mbox topflite)
> (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Sun Dec 16 13:34:37 2001)
>X-From_: root@peel.net Sun Dec 16 13:24:33 2001
>Return-Path: <root@peel.net>
>Received: from blaster1.peel.com ([216.52.138.23])
> by jupiter.nildram.co.uk (8.10.0-mysql/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fBGDOWC28607
> for <posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk>; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 13:24:32 GMT
>Delivered-To: <posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk>
>Received: by blaster1.peel.com (Postfix, from userid 0)
> id 6D65261DC; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
>To: posthamster@catfish.nildram.co.uk
>From: "Virgin Wines" <virginwines1979@peel.net>
>Reply-To: notify@peel.net
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Subject: Great Christmas wine at a bargain price
>Message-Id: <20011216122428.6D65261DC@blaster1.peel.com>
>Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
mail from: root@peel.net in the SMTP envelope, and a Reply-To address
of notify@peel.net. However:
Dig peel.net@NS1.PEEL.COM (216.52.138.3)
Authoritative Answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
Query for peel.net type=255 class=1
peel.net MX (Mail Exchanger) Priority: 10 returns.peel.net
peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.9
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
peel.net SOA (Zone of Authority)
Primary NS: ns1.peel.com
Responsible person: root@peel.com
serial:2001092202
refresh:10800s (3 hours)
retry:3600s (60 minutes)
expire:604800s (7 days)
minimum-ttl:86400s (24 hours)
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
returns.peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.24
ns1.peel.com A (Address) 216.52.138.3
ns2.chi.pnap.net A (Address) 216.52.129.33
One MX record, and when one tries to connect to it:
----begin telnet capture----
$ telnet returns.peel.net 25
Trying 216.52.138.24...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
----end telnet capture----
Other Usenet posters have reported a similar inability to connect to returns.peel.net (and the name of the MX itself is indicative of a rather interesting sense of humour):
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9njtk0%24aa2
So, the owners and operators of peel.net have cunningly managed, it would appear, to not only convince two of the UK's largest and more respected companies to use their service for what Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines apparently genuinely believed was a true, genuine, opt-in email marketing operation, they have also managed (by technical means) to ensure that their own bandwidth will not be wasted by such trivial communications as "message undeliverable" bounce messages either.
One wonders if an alleged spam operation with such a fascinating mindset might attempt a little social engineering hack, against a news site which exposed their antics so comprehensively. On 24 December, I doubt whether many of PSINet's key UK staff were operating. A telephone call to support, followed by a fax request to "detag our domain as we won't be using it any more" might produce an interesting result, might it not? Especially since one imagines PSINet UK have a handy internal Web front end tool for support staff to use to register/modify/detag domains, and that support staff on 24 December might have had other things on their mind, and when one considers how easy faxes are to fake (which makes it hard to understand why so many UK ISPs insist on them for such requests, rather than an email originating from the customer concerned's netblock, or a PGP signed email from the admin contact of the domain concerned).
--
Anthony Edwards
anthony@catfish.nildram.co.uk
Who wouldn't work for double time and a half which I am getting for christmas boxing day & newyears day, atleast it pays the bills
Well, I'm working for cs at Amazon, and we're here for all of the holidays. Amazingly quiet for all of the Christmases we "ruin" because Johnny didn't get his Harry Potter toys on time.
My work life is more like my grandpa's was - some chores every day, some seasonal peaks and valleys, and it takes place at home. This includes Christmas.
The problem - The computer world needs chores that kids can do so they feel like they are part of things. Ideas?
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
should relax and do something fun!
everyone seems to be posting how doctors, police, etc have to work since they are public services, but that jewish colleagues cover them. well, that seems very nice, but not very fair. on yom kippur and rosh hashanah, jews don't get the day off, and end up taking a personal day so they can do whatever it is that floats their boat.
so why should they work for christmas?
in israel, nothing is closed on christmas, but a lot of people go out and have a nice dinner or do something special for christmas, simply because its a holiday everywhere else and the businesses in every OTHER country are closed.
maybe its because christmas is no longer about celebrating the birth of christ and more about capitalist consumerism taking over the world and making everyone spend lots of $$ on presents...
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
what about all of us who are non religious, and dont give a rats ass about christmas or anything? i dont see any problem working on christmas, in fact i went to a chinese restruant today and they were packed, the holidays are the busiet time for them and they dont care if its christmas or not. holidays are for those who believe in them. if you dont, then what difference does it make?
Sun is Warm, Grass is Green
I'm a volunteer firefighter and I ended up pulling a 12 hour shift christmas eve-christmas day. I figured : "Hey, I'm young, unattached why not?", and it wasn't that bad. I higly encourage anyone who has any interest in become a firefighter to look in to it. It's great fun, very rewarding, and a chance to help people. Personally, I think that this year's christmas eve was the best I've had in a while, It was very nice to completely avoid the commercialism that sometimes surounds christmas.
Merry Christmas! Be Safe!
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
That's why I may have a halo at work, but sleep in the dog house. Oh, yeah, my wife is a programmer. You would figure she'd understand, right? Nah! Go figure.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I am assuming the premise of the article is who works on Christmas. Well honestly I prefer not to, and will actually kick and scream if asked to. But when it comes to other holidays I dont mind such as New Years Day, Thanksgiving, or any other legal holiday. Christmas and the 4th of July was and is still my favorite days off during the year, all the others dont matter to me that much.
I have 11 days off over the holidays, paid time off which doesn't dip into my earned time off. I was happy but the catch-22 is that the last several days I will be insanely bored and lazy. I love my job(and my boss) but being a computer junky and an incredible introvert doesn't help much.
Easter is much the same, spread over many days - and any other holidays just don't seem to have the 'buzz' to them to be too worried about missing!
Of course, working on the helpdesk for school admin systems means we have virtual holidays several weeks of the year anyway, but thats beside the point :D
Why "especially in America"?
This is not an anti-American rave. I am just puzzled. As far as I know, southern hemisphere countries are MORE likely to regard Christmas as THE holidays, because it is also summer here. So this is the most likely time for the "long break". Whereas you Americans have your long break in the middle of the year.
That aside, many fine people are working today, because it is bushfire season here - with a vengeance. We have half a dozen firetrucks - all crewed by volunteers - parked across the road, waiting for the fire front to come this way.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I gladly work the holidays -- volunteered for them three years running, for three reasons:
--Holiday pay is twice my regular pay, but there's zero work (no one is in their offices to screw up their networks on Christmas or Thanksgiving, so no work for me). I get paid double-time to play my GBA for ten hours.
--Quiet time. Do you know how blessedly quiet my office is when there's no one in it but me? The phone doesn't ring, nothing demands my attention. I get to just be here with myself.
--I'm not a Christian anyway, so no big deal on working Christmas. With the money I make from working a couple of days of holidays, I can buy myself something nice later as my own little present.
Working at Compaq as a computer technician we rarely get days off at all. Maybe one or two days off a month. Luckily my shift didn't have to work christmas eve or christmas, but a few of the shifts had to work yesterday. Unfortunately today will be my last day off until next Tuesday. That's right Compaq wants us to work right up until midnight on New Years eve. But that's what I get working for working at a production facility for a company that has not yet shown that they care about not making their employees and temps working 12 hours a day 7 days a week.
I spent four years in the US Marine Corps - just recently got out - and it seemed to me that an unusual number of Marines (myself included) would be stuck working the holiday whether it was the actual holiday itself or one of the other days off. I'm sure its like that for all of our military, and even more so now.
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." - Tao of Programming
Xmas, New Year's Eve and Day, oh and just got rotated into the graveyard shift. Yup, nuttin' like being a sysadmin in a 24x7 data center. On the bright side I'll have all of those lovely *NIX boxen all to myself tonight/tommorow morning and a fresh copy of LOTR to keep me company ;-)
People that volunteer to work on Christmas usually get PHAT paychecks. :P I usually got stuff like 2 comp days off, double time, or in the case of last year, I billed a nice big holiday dinner for myself to the company.
:-)
:)
I always volunteer to work on the holidays. My family gets together a few days before Christmas, when everybody is actually available. Works out great.
New Year's Eve? Blah, I'd rather be at work. I can get drunk on the other nights and not put up with jacked up covers, long lines, watered down drinks, and a bathroom line that never ends.
I get paid more for working New Year's Eve, too.
My family... We do it often, if only because it's one of a few places open.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
As someone who has had to work holidays in the past, I really appreciated something of a friend of mine did one year, and we've both done it every year since. He goes to the bank, gets a few new $5 bills,(usually $20 to $50 worth) a few of the "Money Cards" inserts a $5 bill in each, along with a little handwritten "Thank you and Happy Holidays" and drives around and finds open businesses like convenience stores, gas stations, whatever he runs across and delivers a card to the clerk (or clerks) and wishes them a Merry Christmas and walks out the door. His wife has made cookies and cakes and delivered them to the police dept., hospital emergency rooms, even fire stations, there is never a plan, just whatever happens to arise. He once stopped to help an out of town motorist who had a flat tire, and a car full of kids to deal with. He changed the flat for the woman, and each child had their own envelope when he left. Imagine the memories of the children, and the warm feeling you get by doing something totally unexpected for someone. Long before the movie "Pay It Forward" I've seen this work time and time again, and it never fails to put a smile on the face of all. Sure it sounds sappy, but the feeling you get is well worth it.
The conversation with my boss went something like this:
Boss: "We need you to come in on Tuesday -- we have to upgrade a customer system in Taiwan and we'll need you there if something goes wrong."
Me: "But I'm not customer service or support! I'm the Release Engineer! Besides, I haven't seen my family in a year! I'm flying out day after tomorrow!"
Boss: "Well, some of the developers are coming in."
Me: "Yeah? They're Chinese nationals on H1-B visas who are afraid you'll have them deported if they say no. Besides, I already cut short my Thanksgiving vacation for you!"
Boss: [waving hand] "You can can work on Christmas; you can always see your family later."
Me: "I can work on Christmas; I can always see my family later."
Pathetic, eh? The worst part is that this isn't even an emergency; my boss just decided that the 25th was as good a time as ever. So, I sat at work for 7 hours and they didn't even need me to be there. To cap it all off, my boss finished up the day by thanking us for coming in, telling us he'll "need us in all day tomorrow", and finished off with his morale-building "don't forget, the economy is bad and you won't find another job" speech.
I really, really miss the .com days where employers had to kiss your ass -- my girlfriend has been out of work for three months, and I'm fresh enough out of school that I'm not positive I could find another job right away (we'd be completely broke in two weeks with neither of us working). As soon as things recover a bit I'm out of this soulless excuse for a company.
And maybe I'll call Microsoft and tell 'em about the company's somewhat lax policy towards licensing all the software we include on our systems.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
As a DBA & Senior developer I have found over the years that holidays and especially the christmas season are wonderfull times to be at work. Just think about it... a few days where there are no other people (and I use that word loosely) such as managers, sales staff, clients, etc. who are also working which leaves me quiet (except for the blasting tunes :) time to get some serious coding done rather than having idiots^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople interrupting. every ten minutes to ask an inane question that they should already know the answer to.
It also is a chance to get caught up on some of the minutiae that tends to get forgotten about.
One thing to remember is that the holidays are a quiet time that most people like to spend with their families so there is not likely to be many people who normally want to be working in that time period so when the astute programmer volunteers to be the _poor_ person to work the holidays people tend to look on you with kindness. Now, come January as everyone else is back working _THAT_ is the best time to take some time off. The stores are a all open. the stress of the holidays is over, the post holiday sales are starting. :) And... "OH! Did _I_ forget my cell phone at work at the end of the holidays... Ooops! (Tee hee)"
Normally, the 24th and 25th are days off for me, especially since I'm still in college (MIT RULES!). However, since I'm fortunate enough to be captain of my own ship (I own my own business) I am working today, and was yesterday also. I happened to be working on Thanksgiving also. I end up working a lot more than I did when I had a job and got vacation days and all that. But the other side of the coin is that the rewards are far greater than they ever used to be. I make more money, I enjoy the work (enough that I'm working today when most others aren't), and I get to choose what days I take off. In February, I think I'll just take the entire second week off and go to Cancun. April 15th, when everyone will be rushing to get their taxes finished and in the mail, I think I'll take that day off also. If the price of such benefits is to do work that I enjoy, on Christmas, I'll gladly pay the price year after year.
As the SysAdmin for a K-12 school, these holidays are the best time for me to get any real work done. I'm taking off Christmas Day and New Year's Day, but every other day I'll be 'slaving' away. The nice thing is that I come and go as I wish, so if I want to take part of the afternoon off to watch a movie, I do! (I get paid by the hour.)
>"instead of enjoying what most in the world (especially in America) would consider
'the Holidays'."
*Most* people in the world are Chinese or Indian, and they have a very different viewpoint on what the 'holidays' are...
(See, we can't even talk about it without being parochial... 'holidays' = 'holy days', a term which was created by the same bureaucracy that brought you Christmas, which - and this is verifiable, check your history books - wasn't advocated by any Christian church until about 200 years ago.)
Now if you define 'most people' as 'Christians and Jews' the way alot of the west does, then perhaps most people do indeed think of these days as the holidays.
I for one have had to work every single holiday for over two years now, by virtue of my being the one person on my team who really is indispensible... so management, who has a 'someone must be working on this at all times' rule, has decided that since we need one person in over the holidays, it must be me.
As a result, I pick other holidays and take those days off. This year it will be Chinese New Year, Ganesha Chaturthi, Guy Fawkes Day, the Oregon Country Fair, and all of Burning Man.
Don't let the bastards tell you / sell you what is holy.
-foo freen
December 24th was a holiday this year, because the Emperor's Birthday, which falls on the 23rd, was a Sunday this year, so the observance was moved up a day so people got Monday off. December 25th, however, was just a normal Tuesday, and I was here at work with almost everyone else. We will however have December 31st to January 3rd off for New Year holiday time.
Needless to say, I'm envious of the people in the home office in America, where it seems that most people have started taking holiday from around December 14th...
Mom and dad (separated) both decided to have "the kids" on the 26th....
Then it doesn't really matter anymore, I can just as well do some work-things...
Roger.
This is the first time I've cared about christmas in probably 10 years. Of course, I'm also deleriously tired from being up till the wee hours assembling stuff christmas eve and being awakened at 7am, and having to stay up tonight assembling all the stuff she got from her grandparents. Oh well, every pleasure has it's price...
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
I worked this holiday >:( I found myself being employed at the beginning of this month with a call at 2:30am on a friday night/saturday morning, by a company doing MSN support to start that monday. Today, Christmas day, I worked from 8am-8pm giving tech support for msn broadband, a horrid, horrid, job. They pretty much kept me from going home for the holidays since I'm a dormed college student. Evil M$ strikes again, depriving yet another of a good time.
TRiPTMiND
// TRiPTMiND \\
...is what my friend said after I told him that it was an easy choice between spending time with my sister's in-laws and getting paid double-time to surf the OC-12 while the rack-mounted microwave serves up another frozen pizza. (mmmm....forbidden boss's junk food stash....)
/. and shout "Happy Holidays!"
Maybe those of us that work the holidays don't mind it because we know we're just there to be a warm body. Hell, the only person that called me all day was my boss, making sure that I wasn't too bored. I haven't had a day this calm since....well....last year during the holidays. (I'm in our network monitoring dept.)
So I say boot up your command center, (complete with two HDTV video projectors and 40" CRT), log into your favorite P2P software, pull up a copy of
Me big ol bad ass unix guru for ACME Megacorp. If that pager goes off and it's a "be there" thing. I'm working.
I still got my daily dose of spam on x-mas day, though it appears I had a slight respite in that it appears I only got about 75% of what I usually get . . .
We all have the SIGGRAPH paper submission
deadline on Jan 9. Our lab was plenty busy
today (as well as yesterday and any other day
between the start of break and the deadline).
Otherwise, where would people be able to party? :)
I'll give you the "in America" part but the "most in the world" part is incredibly wrong. While Christianity is the dominant religion in the world, it is no where near half. Most in the world today were working and trying to earn enough to feed their families like any other day.
Devon
I always read at -1. Most posts modded to -1, Troll/Flamebait/Disagrees-With-Me seem to be funnier than posts modded to +5, Funny. :)
ACs, Trolls, Flamebaits, and Offtopics at +6 moderation.
This is a good option, if something has to be done and everybody agrees, work from home.
And keep reading slashdot as at work 8).
Not to tote my corporate benefactor any more than I should but...
Sitting at one of a slew of December meetings in my first year at Rogue Wave I was surprised to find from mgmt folks that I should not be expected to show for the x-mas-->new-year week.
They shut the offices down for the holidays...
So, should you be looking at RW as an employer, among other myriad reasons to take the job remember that you can add 1 week to that fatty vacation pkg.
(and no, I'm not an hr tool, I'm a dev III)
Merry late 0011...
It seems that nobody at SARC are working, aside from the lonley soul who decided to inform us about the Zoher/Scherzo virus.
And i quote "Virus definitions that can detect and remove W32.Zoher@mm will be included in LiveUpdate after 12/26/2001. The instructions that follow assume that you are performing this removal on or after the date that these definitions have been released. In some cases, virus writeups are published before the actual definitions are released."
[Nothing witty here, move on]
Well, let's see..
Where I work part/full time, Steak N Shake, we were closed for Thanksgiving and Christmas (normally 24/7).
The Denny's closest to us was closed, but I heard one out a bit further was open (also normally 24/7).
Walgreens around here has some stores open 24/7 (which I think are still all open), and some stores that are only open regular hours (in which case I think they all ran on their Sunday schedule).
As always, 7-11 is open.
On my way home from the family dinner, I cruised by QuikTrip (the local 24/7 gas station) as my tank was low, and it was open.
This morning I saw an ambulance flying down the street, so I know they're working as well.
Honestly, I can't remember a Thanksgiving or Christmas where I have worked (although I've worked plenty of day-befores and day-afters). I guess I'm kinda lucky.
Don Head
UNIX/Linux Administrator
Try to look beyond your immediate surroundings. Christmas doesn't really mean anything to most human beings. Worldwide, Christianity is a minority religion.
I will not give up vacation. But fixed "holidays" are just an inconvenience.
I like to work the Holidays as well, no one in the office. I can accomplish so much more that way. Besides, it's better than going home and facing my family, who still think that I should stop playing with computers and get a 'real' job.
The dingo ate my sig.
I work for the IS department at a Hospital. They wanted to make sure that all the systems where up and running, so there I was sitting all day long and nothing really happened. I did get something I cant get at home.... Some Rest.
I love to work the holiday weeks (Thanksgiving and Christmas). No one is in the office and I can catch up on most of my work. I'm taking vacation next week instead, when everyone returns and the work starts pouring in again.
This is relaxing. In these weeks, work=vacation. Everyone here is relaxed and here for the same reason, to catch up. Unless, they're the new guys who have no vacation...
what better time to finish installing suse and a new kernel on my laptop and try to get my orinoco card working? no one is paging/calling/emailing with the next big crisis ... it may not be considered hard work, but it lets me get some serious coding done at home, and that keeps me from having to go into the office, so it helps productivity ... that's loosely defined as work, i believe. besides, we already celebrated chanukah :)
when it rains, it gets real soggy. when it pours, i'm under the tap just _waiting_ for the joy
No it doesn't.
During my Uni years I worked w/end nights at a servo (gas station) in Australia. Public holidays were easy money, drunks left about 2 ~ 3 am, then dead quiet until 8am changover. Xmax was even quieter ... but funnier.
About 4am onwards parents would start turning up with thier kids bikes wanting to use the (free) air pump to pressurise the tyres (remember it's 30 degrees celcius at this time of year). You've never seen someone swear so much as when an over-inflated tyre goes 'pop' on Xmas morning at 4.30am. It took me about 15 minutes to stop laughing, and about the same time for 'Dad' to stop swearing too. Caught it all on video.
Also funny was watching parents turn up at 5.30am, badly in need of sleep or coffee, kid in one hand, kid hanging on to new present with the other, asking for batteries. You can just tell that is the last time junior is ever going to get a present that can't be plugged in to the wall socket.
Of couse, working Xmas nights meant that I would have the perfect opportunity to skip meeting the reletives. I never saw them for the rest of the year, and Xmas would only to remind me WHY I never saw them. (Eg, myself and father only gainfully employed member of entire clan, we support the rest with our taxes). Missed every drunken Xmas brawl from 92 to 97.
Now I work at my company's European Data Center (Switzerland), 1 public holiday worked = 2 comp days, that I can spend making a long weekend in Europe or adding on to annual leave back home. Holidays NOW mean I can either catchup on maintenance work or surf for pr0n at high speed. Bonus that I saw my first ever "White Christmas" this year.
Family x,000's kilometers away = bliss.
Girlfriend x,000's kilometers away = blisters.
Nosfucious.
Q:I was listening to a CD in Grip and it sounded horrible! What's up? A:Perhaps you are listening to country music
railway signalmen.
or in the USA i think u call us towermen.
I work in a company that provides technical support. Hence, despite Christmas, we are working. The bad news is that most of our support engineers are here in India, and so it is only 24th in US when it is 25th here. So, most of these guys have to work on 25th (Indian time), and usually they don't have much of a choice.
And no, not everyone is India is a Hindu, there is a significant amount of Christian, Moslem and Jewish population here.
I'm a uni student. Whats work? They haven't taught me yet.
Hey Welcome to the real world!! /. actually spent space for this whine.
A lot of ppl have to work during the holidays.
Mainly the blue collar workers that service all you white collar workers.
Heh make it osund like its a big deal or something.
Imagine the families that are barely making it and both parents work.
Or the Emergency personnel who are working xmas morning or thansgiving afternoon.
I cant believe
Since I am a relative newbie at work (5 years) the number of days I can take as vacation AND save from year to year are few. I work during the holiday in order to 'spend' more later. We don't have to take a holiday for Christmas or New Years (when we are closed) if we work both sides of the holiday.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
at a tax software company (MacInTax/Softview) and Christmas was most certainly an inconvienience in the planning department. Came right in the middle of tax season..............
We have batch jobs running, and servers that control telemetry / life support devices at the hospital(s). It'd kinda suck to have someone die because we had a server go down and everyone was sleeping off a tryptophan turkey high.
Besides, 12 hrs at time-and-a-half plus comp time aint bad.
-AC
I was riding the pager this Christmas and was called-out around 7pm to restore residential dial-tone. Which means:
A) someone monitoring had to see the trouble
b) someone else had to call and tell me to fix it
c) now these customers can call there families at the cheap after hours rates.
d) now we all get a tidy sum for our efforts
I do dsl tech support and worked xmas, 9:30 to 4:30 and never recieved a call, time and a half plus holiday pay :)
Yesterday I got up early, made omelettes, cooked a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, set out the good china, served up the food, played board games with the kids, visited relatives, etc., having spent the previous three days baking, shoppping, wrapping, scrubbing, entertaining, refereeing, etc. Today I'm back at "work" at the office, sitting in a comfortable chair in front of a computer screen all day with few distractions. Last Christmas I had plenty of time to spend with the family because I was in the middle of being downsized, so I was glad to have a job to go to this morning, although I could have used a little more sleep.
Merry Christmas to all.
It's good to know I wasn't the only one working on non-service/tourism-related tasks this holiday season. My workstation of choice: laptop running Linux (2.4.7) and Win4Lin. This gives me a complete web application development environment so that my HTML, SOAP-XML, RDBMS system can be fully developed without an Internet connection. When Ricochet was alive, I didn't need a self-contained system to work at relatives homes, local taverns, the beach (yes, SoCal resident here), on the train... But now I can (and do) work anywhere & everywhere.
Sad, isn't it?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I worked all day on Christmas from 7 AM until 6 PM. I'm a lift operator at a large ski resort in California. I had to have Chritsmas with my family at 5 AM before I drove up to work. While there I stand in the cold while it snows keeping my lift clean and safe.
Anyone that codes all day in a warm room has it made. Try -30 with a windchill sometime.
-Andy
enjoying what most in the world (especially in America) would consider "the Holidays"
WRONG.
Most people in the world do not consider this time of year as 'the Holidays'. A minority do.
Mathematically speaking there are 1.8 billion Christians in the world: less than 1/3 of the global population. There are 1.1 billion Muslims, 800 million Hindus, 350 million Buddhists, nearly 1 billion 'others' and 1 billion people without a religion. Within 25 years, Islam is projected to be the largest religion in the world.
Religion is much more central to the daily lives of most people in the world outside of the secularized West, where the holidays are primarily a commercial event. Don't forget that the word 'holiday" is derived from 'holy day'.
Before making broad, sweeping pronouncements such as the one you made above, make sure that you don't have basic facts wrong. Travel the world and see how other people live. It's one of the best ways I know of to learn and to think outside of our Western-centric box
testing
sorry about "testing" (wrong button).
I looked through most of the posts, and didn't notice anyone pointing out the Christmas has much older roots - it's been taken from the pagans, who themselves simply observed the passage of the sun in the sky. The original celebration is on the solstice (dec 21).
Personally, I celebrate the solstice - it's the beginning of longer days, and clearly marks another full circuit of our fragile planet around the sun. It's a good thing to joyful about, a much older tradition, and need not be religious or commercial.
I also think it's fair to point out that Jesus would be highly unlikely to be pleased with what we call christmas in America - often unwanted family gatherings, cutting down millions of trees, burning gigawatts of power on tacky lights, while we bomb the shit out of the Afghan people (mmmm. want some hypocrasy with your turkey?) - need I go on?
Personally, I chose long ago to ignore "Christmas," and instead I try to be generous with my time and take care of people's needs where and when I can, not around Dec 25th.
So yeah, I was working - setting up a new web server. It's so peaceful and quiet, a nice day to accomplish something, which seems more in keeping with the time of year anyway.
cheers,
neil
not everyone is christen , you know. ...)
(I'm Jewish
but happy holiday to you all anyhow
Well, I found myself at the local coffee house with a manilla folder full of work related materials for a few hours, hammering away at database schematics. Although not really sitting at the office, it was still work that needed to be done.
Oh well
.:: epoch of entropy
doing the same: phone/IT/and anything else that even resembles a computer stuff.
:)
i agree with the skiing over xmas, the resort right is silly busy and i probably won't go up the mountian for the next week due to the crowds. but i guess if it is the only time you can get here then some skiing is better than no skiing.
how much snow do you have in Copper? we've had 12 ft so far in december.
I usually volunteer for doing oncall Christmas week as it means that I'm not oncall for our office christmas do's (office policy). Normally its quiet, but typically this year the main finance system went pear-shaped at 00:30 on christmas day (has been fine for the last 6 months) ... oh well ... a few hours overtime and i'm back in on the 27th to catch up on sleep ...
... so they'll still be talking to me .
At least i managed to avoid escalating to other members of staff
Most ISPS are open on christmas for tech support and mine was one of them so I was working 4 PM til 1 AM
I don't mind though as i get today and tommorw off (26th and 27th)
Although I was afk most of the day, I did check in once in awhile to see if anyone was experiencing any trouble. While I thought the entire day would pass without an email to the Cotse Helpdesk or a visit to #helpdesk chat, lo and behold one email made it to me by the end of the day. Ah well... so much for a day (completely) off ;p
John Holstein, Cotse Helpdesk/Support
While working during the holidays is certainly unpleasant, be glad you're still working!
:(
:)
/.'er facing a questionable future in the current recession.
I survived the layoffs in July and thought I was safe... wrong! They said it was because of the Sept 11 attack, that our clients weren't paying because they were locked out of their offices for 2 weeks.
When I first was laid off, I was up beat, I was certain that I would have a job within a month...
that was 10 weeks ago. From what I've been reading, there are a lot of people that have been job searching for far longer. It certainly doesn't look good
Unemployment is a joke, they cap it at $200 a week (AZ) which is 1/5 of what I was making.. good thing my wife got a job right before I was laid off otherwise we would be totally screwed.
Our savings are almost depleted, every month we have to take more out to pay our bills.
I couldn't afford to buy too many christmas gifts, the ones I did buy were on credit. Christmas was a burden instead of a time of joy;
I couldn't wait for it to be over.
In any case Im trying to stay hopeful that things will turn for the better in January
I'm sure I am not the only
Where are all the IT jobs?
Here on the corporation server farm, everyone gets a turn in the barrel. While we don't have to actually be here, someone has to carry the pager. I had in Christmas of 1998 and I was paged by a machine that crashed on Christmas Day. This year, I had it all weekend and no problems. I really should not say anymore details, you know, security and non-disclosure and all that.
Yup, I'm a refrigeration service tech. And things break down even during holidays. Usually the stores/warehouses have people check stock, and I am on call. Expected a call yesterday (25th) have to go in this afternoon.
Oh well. Most clients only call if there is a real serious emergency. Can't get parts anyways.
Derek
Your own assertion is no better founded than the one you responded to. The simple fact is that holidays also have a secular purpose. A sample from Asia, where I originated: Christmas is a public holiday in Malaysia (6% Christian), Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Macau, Phillippines, Brunei, Indonesia (largest Muslim country in the world, 4th overall) and India. Moreover, some countries (like Taiwan) have holidays on Dec 25th that coincide with Christmas. It is wrong to assume that it requires a majority Christian population to have a holiday on Dec 25th.
I had to work. As a police officer, Houston had 2700 calls for service between 10 pm and 5 am on the night of 24 (morning of 25th). We had (on my area alone) a shooting DOA and an aggravated kidnapping/robbery with a 13 min chase. Caught the robbery guy, shooter is still loose.
I sometimes regret having to be emergency services and work on holidays. I don't get to enjoy them with my family and relax with the Mrs.
But then ALOT of time there is a pride that comes out when you do your job and do it well. Everyone remembers their encounter with a bad officer and that is ALWAYS a bad thing. That is how people then reflect on the whole department. But the ones you never think about, the ones that you sometimes have the chance to say thank you to since they helped you in some way or another. There are MANY of those.
hmmm... when faced with the choice of spending a day with people being all sappy and talking about the "holiday spirit" or bytes (or bits for that matter) I will choose the bytes everytime. They don't bicker as much.
actors and technicians work holidays, and weekends too. we generally only get mondays off, and if that monday happens to be on a week before the show opens the technicians don't get a break.
don't forget that movie theaters are open on holidays too.
there's no business like show business...
While I was in school I often worked on weekends on holidays, either on a school project or a job. While I was in the military I spent many holidays away from my loved ones. After that I worked briefly in the "corporate" world, where I got a couple of days off, then back to work. For the last 14 years I've been self-employed, and have worked on holidays and/or weekends ever since, either because customers had an urgent need or I had a deadline to meet.
.
In a recent survey, it was revealed at 24% of the workforce has to work over the holidays, and it makes sense. I think that poeple who complain about working over the holidays have an unrealistic view of the world.
Where I am working now, the college is totally closed until after new years, so our department has time off, the only reason we need to come in is for an emergency (like network failure or server problems)...
Here in Sydney about 5000 volunteers spent Xmas and boxing day fighting massive bush fires.
* * Always question "the National Interest" - 9 times out of 10 it is a cover for evil
I can see why, though. It's apparently a lot of peoples' favorite day to get drunk and beat the shit out of their spouses. Celebrating the birth of our Saviour by arresting two people in three separate situations for domestic assault, and two drunk drivers who wandered into cows at 25MPH is probably not what the man upstairs had in mind.
On the other hand, the Christmas spirit does exist. Four of our reservists (the police version of a volunteer firefighter) actually volunteered this year, and it was nice to have someone working in the car with me. And a woman who I wrote for some traffic beef two years ago spent most of Christmas eve flagging cops and firefighters and private security guards down to give them hot chocolate.
I'd still rather be spending it with my girlfriend and her daughter, though.
The US Air Force is manned 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. If I am not working, I am either on call or on leave. Even when I sleep. Those people in the intelligence community monitoring enemy communications (Afghanistan smoke signals), satellite photos, etc. work nonstop, for example. Chow halls and hospitals are open every day without exception. Flight crews and airplane mechanics are on call with packed bags (mobag, or mobility bag). Communications people monitor our computer networks nonstop.
The Japanese smacked us hard because let's face it, nobody would attack on a Sunday morning. That's taboo. Or is it? What's next, an airplane crashing into a building on Christmas or Thanksgiving or some other holiday us Americans hold sacred?
Luckily I had Christmas off, but again, I was on call in case something broke that I was responsible for. We've been called into work at 0300 (3 AM) before for no reason other than to check our reaction time that early in the morning.
John Gaughan
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Us folks in the world of radio have to work on holidays.....
I agree a story should always be taken in its own context, never compare it to other versions. Do you have the abridged or unabridged version? I think I'll definitely buy it soon, I've had to book since I was 10. I'm sure my kids will love the audio version, if they can tear it away from me ;-)
I'm just glad that I can give my kids something that requires their imagination, ie. not TV.
Thanks.
Ah, where to begin. I said such a foul-mouthed blow-hard would have to comport themselves better at work than they do here, in order to earn my employ. You then call me an idiot because you do, in fact, comport yourself better at work than you do here.
I gather from your last two paragraphs that you deliberately hide your identity in order to not sully your otherwise good reputation while being an ass online. I must ask what need you have that is filled by making such a fool of yourself?
Lastly, I wonder why you seem so happy being able to spew hatred, saying things to people that you do not say to their face. Have you ever read The Picture of Dorian Gray? It would seem Oscar Wilde is still relevant reading in the digital world.
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
Interesting how this, perhaps lame, but definitely on-topic post was moderated down days after it was written -- at the same time that a moderator moderated down other posts I've made in the past week. How come my posts are all the sudden receiving attention? I've noticed this before now but it's quite obvious today that I'm on someone's hit list. Cool.