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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.
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 :)
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.
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.
"Holidays"... what are they?!
# man -k holiday
holiday: nothing appropriate.
Hmmm.....
Bastards...
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.
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.
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
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'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
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
Does moderating Slashdot count as work?
Don't listen to the Fat Bastard, he's lying! It's us, the Elves and Reindeers, that do all the work!
Damn you Santa!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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?
Fortunately we have 2-3 (or more) people assigned to support each system, so we can rotate the hot pagers around. I have to carry it this Christmas/New Years, but had Thanksgiving off. (Like I said someone has to carry the pager!)
When working contracts in manufacturing, major holidays were the busiest times, as it was the only time the manufacturing lines were down long enough to do non-emergency system upgrades and enhancements.
About the only contracts I've ever had that didn't require holiday work were pure programming jobs for the Telco and Property Management sectors.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
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?
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
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
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.