Slashdot Mirror
Star Wars Sickout
Brahmastra writes "The New York Post reports that it will cost employers $628,880,000 in lost productivity on the first two days of Star Wars Episode III - Return of the Sith . How many of you are planning to skip at least part of your workday on the first two days?"
People have to learn to live off of 3 hours of sleep. The movie start at midnight on Wednesday. It will be over at 2:30am. I'll be home be 3am. Asleep by 4am and wake up at 7am. Typical night for a programmer.
Not only am I going to Star Wars next week, I'm planning on taking my staff as well. So I guess I'll be the one responsible for the loss of productivity in my own area. Oh well, c'est la vie.
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
Kids at my school drove through red lights at twelve midnight to get tickets (they bought a whole row), and now they're scalping them at my school. They're so afraid that the tickets will be stolen, that they carry knives with them. The movie's sold out at the local theatre now, and I blame them.
The fact is, you don't just magically get time off when a new movie comes out. Someone has to cover for you where you work, or your work doesn't get done. If your work doesn't get done, you get fired. How does this add up to billions in lost funds?
Do, do not, or delegate to someone else: there is no try.
Yeah, right. This is the final installment in the series so it's not like this is going to be one of many "productivity hits" that businesses will have to suffer. You want to bitch about a productivity hit, why not bitch about the dumbasses who cannot follow IT department policy about opening insecure attachments and who do other things like that which open them up to worms? God only knows how much money businesses have lost to such willfully negligent behavior.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Most single people are used to picking up the slack of parents in the office, anyway. This time, it just gives the other people a chance to cut out for a day and make the family people who are always taking days off or leaving early (without counting it as a vacation or sick day) to cover them.
Except people like me, of course, who wouldn't see star wars if my company paid me to take the day off and watch it.
I remember one job in particular where I was repeatedly asked to work overtime because I did not have a family. I was part of a team, and the supervisor and the team repeatedly made the point to me that I did not have a family, so I had more free time, and because of that, I was expected to take more overtime (and it was a salaried job, so I did not get paid OT).
I'll skip work for a movie I know is good. As for this thing...I've been burned twice. I'll let all you guys go the first day. That way, I can find out on slashdot if it is any good, or is yet another Lucasonian fiasco. I can wait until the second weekend. If it's what I think it is, I can wait for the DVD.
Serenity...I'm skipping work for that.
The cake is a pie
My employers decided that it would be smarter to rent out a theater on premiere day for a showing at 4 PM rather than have people skip out. No lines or sleeping in tents for me. It also helps that my company is a hedge fund founded by a bunch of engineering nerds. They want to go as much as we do. It's a win-win situation. Boost morale, prevent "sick" leaves, and satisfy your inner nerd. The company is run by smart people I tell you :-).
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I think you missed the point.
My boss is the manager of a data mining company which has been working on branching out into video production over the past few years. (The entire point of starting the data mining was to pay for starting the video production company and to do it right, which included producing only quality scripts and making sure the employees could enjoy their work and focus only on producing a good product -- not on meeting deadlines.)
He is not a manager of a comic book store.
I should know.
I am my boss -- just in case you missed it from my comment previously, where I said:
Ahhhhhh.
It's good to be the boss.
BTW, even if you single, childless folk are really as productive as you say, if everyone chose your "super productive" lifestyle, it would only last 30-40 years till everyone was too old to work... and no young 'uns to replace you.
That is called Europe.
And if you think the Muslim immigrants, that will be a majority in 30-40, years will vote to support the welfare state and pension of the old, white, Christians/atheists that treated the Muslim immigrants as second class citizens, you are nuts. Europe has a nice socialist utopia, but they can only sustain it for 1 generation.
I would also argue that this drastic decline in birthrates in Europe is due to their nihilist belief system that makes cultural suicide preferable to children.
And us parents are used to picking up the slack of single people who call in sick with the "brown-bottle flu".
All you singles want to do is stay out late drinking, having sex, and smoking pot. You don't want to work at all. Even when you're in the office, you don't do even half the work of a married person, because the drive to keep your job to feed your kid just isn't there.
That's the other side of the coin.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
hahaha not a chance. really - i'm getting more since getting married than I ever did as a singleton. i've been married 9 years, got 1 kid, and things just get better.
no wonder you're divorced.
We're all going together and I'm buying the tix and popcorn. They are going to go anyway.. this avoids the guilt, turns it into a 'perk', improves morale and turns the loss of productivity into a tax deductible expense (possibly).. plus when we're standing in line we'll be intermixing Star Wars Talk with work talk.... To warm up, I'm showing Ep's 1,2,4-6 in the conference room next week (We're going in 'original order' 4-6,1,2...)
I recommend more businesses do this. But please not at the early afternoon show of the 19th at the Shoreline Cinemas... mmkay?
"It will result in increased spending on movie tickets and refreshments, increased foreign and domestic tourism, and increased business in shops near the theaters,"
What's the justification for an increase in tourism?
I'll have to disagree with you on this. I'm single, I rarely stay out late or have that much sex (at least not to the point where it impacts my job), and I don't smoke pot at all. I'm also 22, and work twice as many hours a week then the other gentlemen I work with, who are twice my age and have childeren. Parents picking up the slack indeed. Call me when you're done working 80 hour weeks for 3 years and we'll talk. P.S. My drive to make money is because I want to be wealthy, not because of some inate need to want to have to support dependents.
I'm not even sure if I am supposed to take your response seriously, since you claim to be a parent, but have stileproject.com as your homepage... However:
The difference is that parents are able to use their kids or family as an acceptable excuse whenever they like. There is no stigma in doing that.
"I have to leave two hours early every Friday to take my kids to practice", is acceptable.
"I have to come in late today becuase my child has a doctor appointment", is acceptable.
"I'm not coming in today, because my child has the day off from school", is acceptable.
And it really builds up. Who knows if it's always legitimate or not, but using "children" or "family" as an excuse is rarely frowned upon.
But if someone who has other obligations needed time off, they would not recieve the same treatment. Of course, parents talk about how hard being a parent is and try to get sympathy however they can, but the fact is, you're hired to do a job. The same job I am. That you decided to have kids and a family is not my responsibility or my problem. But when you take excessive time off over the year and the rest of the office must cover for you, it is my problem.
If only sick days and vacation days were used, I'd have no problem with it. But I do have a problem that these excuses are often used to take time off that is not subtracted from those sources. They're taken in addition to, because the company can't look bad by being "anti-family".
I also like how you try to make it sound like you bust your ass and it's the single people that slack off. See, we work hard, because we have to cover our own work and yours. And our drive is enjoying our money. Spending it how we like. We don't have this sense of self-entitlement to our salary, our job, our time off, our "off the books" time off or anything else.
Parents don't even do half the work of a single person, because they spend the whole day on the phone talking to their kids or their spouse or someone else about problems they're having with their kids or their spouse. And then, of course, they start babbling to coworkers about their family life or their kids or their spouse. The amount of time lost to parents chronically avoiding their duties because of "family" is riduclous.
And no, that doesn't apply to every parent. There are many parents who make work a priority and don't ditch the other people in the office with work because they had to go meet the principal during work time. But there are a lot who do. Enough that it has become a stereotype.
As you see from the responses to this thread, the number of people who feel similar is not small. And we aren't against you taking time off from work for family. Just when you do it in addition to the vacation and sick time you already have. You should only be able to use sick time and vacation time. Just like it's all the rest of us have.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK people are legally entitled to take time off work for exceptional circumstances. That includes, for example, caring for a dependent (eg child, sick relative) or partner, attending funerals, etc. There's no limit on the amount of time, other than that it should be "reasonable" and needs to be agreed with the employer. There's also no requirement that the time be paid, that's up to the employer and employee to agree between themselves.
Parents will inevitably need to take care of their kid(s) from time to time, that's just the way it is. It only becomes a problem if they start taking the piss. If that happens, it's probably not because they're parents, it's probably because they're using their kids as a convenient excuse to grab some more time off. In that case, they should be dealt with as would any other AWOL employee.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
A company I worked with had a very simple solution to deal with smokers. If you smoke (no matter how much or how frequently) you either:
- work 25% longer than the non-smokers
- get paid 25% less than the non-smokers
- quit smoking
Simple as that.
At the moment I'm in a whole different situation: my boss smokes, so he doesn't care about non-smokers. Here the policy is reversed: if you want to breathe clean air for a while, go outside. Fortunately I spent 99% of my time for the past years at client sites, so this does not affect me that much.
http://jcsnippets.atspace.com/ - a collection of Java & C# snippets
In my peer group (16-18 year olds, mostly from a council estate) then a lot of them are pregnant, and most certainly not planned. Even more scary is the number already pushing prams and still trying to attend 6th Form (College).
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Unless your job directly brings in money from a client you are considered a non contributor.
Sad I know.
In law school, there is the famous case of 4 guys who were adrift at sea and nearing death from starvation. 3 had wives and families, one was young and just starting his career. The 3 older men decided they'd kill the younger as the younger had the least to lose and they'd eat him. That's what they did. They were rescued the next day.
So this reasoning has been used for worse consequences than your situation
BTW, the 3 were convicted but later released with time served. Apparently, public opinion was that the 3 were reasonable in what they did, as they didn't know they'd be rescued.