22 Nov I’m OK if they go away 😆
Ted Bauer published this yesterday. If only! I’ve actually been dealing with a couple of people who have decided to get in my sandbox during Thanksgiving week and it’s pretty annoying. I’m still trying to recover from the ‘Rona and the exhaustion has lingered on. I slept 12 hours straight the other night and I’m not even sure I moved much. Whenever I worked full-time, W2 we were always happy when the boss(es) were gone. Go on, git, and leave us alone. The total peculiarity of 2022 has highlighted the need for me to plan better time off around Christmas because who knows. Some of these people may want to pester others at Xmas, too.
In normal circumstances, Ted’s analysis is spot-on:
“This point doesn’t need to be belabored, so I won’t belabor it. From about November 20th — or, roughly, the Monday before Thanksgiving in a given year — until about January 2nd/3rd, it is nearly impossible to find decision-makers in U.S. businesses. If they are truly world-builders, i.e. big companies and big net worth, they are likely in some tropical destination with their families. If they’re high middle managers, the out-of-office is on constantly. You may see them at the holiday party, if your company is doing one, but you may also get a prerecorded video message or all-hands email before or during the holiday party, where they put a generic work backdrop over their current view of Fiji. You know the drill.”
Yes, I know the drill and quite frankly, I assumed it would be that way this year. The news has been showing stories on repeat at every broadcast about how many people are traveling now that the pandemic is supposedly over. (Which it is not in my recent experience.) So… are they just relentlessly checking a cell phone on a plane or sitting with a laptop ignoring the family or what?
“The holidays are a great example of how little this shit matters. Bosses disappear for literally six weeks at a time when, for some verticals, customers are calling constantly to rectify year-end things. Those same bosses use the justification of ‘We need people always on’ or ‘We need spontaneous collaboration’ to justify insane work hours and in-person committments for jobs that could easily be hybrid or remote. And then, for essentially 12% of the calendar year, those same bosses are at Alicia’s second-grade Christmas play for the whole day. Weirdly, the play starts at 6pm. Where were you for the last 10 hours?” -Ted Bauer
Perhaps that is what is going on this season. We don’t want to work full-time in the office but we want to dip in long enough to harass the peons and ensure THEY are working. 🙄
Go back to Alicia’s second-grade play and leave the rest of us alone!
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