Work or Vacation?

My faithful readers may have noticed I haven't been posting much in the past couple of weeks. I took a week off to visit the folks and drink martinis. Seems like I should be able to do that, doesn't it? After all, I get a lot of vacation time and I'm entitled to use it.

Usually, as you all know, we don't like to work hard in my library. We're not one of these fast-paced, post-modern twopointopias. No, we like to sit on the front porch of the library sipping mint julips and watching the frustrated trendsetters (hereby known as "frustys") rushing around. And yet, and yet! I leave for a week, and suddenly everyone decides to start working like crazy, leaving me with a virtual stack of email up to the ceiling to deal with when I returned, a stack of email I'm still not through with yet. And we know what that means. If I'm spending all week reading emails and handling other people's problems, that means I don't have time for more important things like blogging, blog-reading, regular reading, drinking martinis, listening to music, and generally enjoying my stress-free lifestyle. In a word, or rather two words, it sucks.

As I see it the problem is that I need to either ignore work or not take any vacation time. Vacation time is hardly vacation time if there's twice as much work when you return. Now this is a stark choice, but, I think, an easy one. From now on, I think I should ignore work, since obviously I couldn't do without vacation time. The only reason I stayed in academia is that out in the world there are people who have to make do with only two weeks paid vacation. Apparently we live in some third world country where people have to be driven into the ground with work so that we all don't perish from famine. I guess we're living through a period of primitive accumulation or something, as the marxists like to say.

By this point you've probably spotted the problem. If I'm the only one who ignores work, then I just get left behind and look like a slacker. I like other people to look like slackers while I enjoy my undeserved reputation as a miracle worker. So my choice naturally places a burden on other people to also ignore work. This is a burden I think a lot of people can bear. Some folks might like to work all the time and never take a vacation, but not me, baby. I like my time off, and so do a lot of other people.

Thus, since apparently the work won't stop when I'm gone, I recommend that everyone stop work whenever anyone's on vacation. This seems like a fair deal to me. I think the ALA should pass a resolution on this. Annual's right around the corner; I just hope there's still time to get this on the agenda. That's a resolution I could stand behind.