The last paid holiday

[darkemeralds]

Today is the last paid holiday of my career.

Though it's true that Americans don't take much time off compared to, say, Europeans, I'm still very cognizant of the generous plan my public sector place of employment has given me all these years; how many days they've paid me not to be at work.

From the very outset, when I was a just a wee Word Processing Clerk I (anyone remember those?), they gave me ten days of vacation, twelve of sick leave, and three personal days per year.

The vacation-day count has gone up along with the workload, so that when I turn in my badge next week, they're going to pay me for all the vacation I haven't actually managed to take for the last several years. That drop in the retirement bucket will make an audible splash, I can tell you.

As to sick leave...well, I learned an important lesson in my early days. A woman I worked with was singled out for praise because she had never taken a single sick day in, I forget, something like three years. Her reward? A free day off. It was obvious to me that she could have skipped the praise and had twelve paid days off in each of those years.

(Also, praising someone for the "virtue" of naturally good health is, at the very least, annoying.)

In short, I've never been afraid to "call in well" when I needed a mental health day. I'm pretty sure that's why a) I never climbed higher in the organization and b) the benefits of retiring at the first possible moment outweigh the big pay cut I'm about to take.

Besides, they don't buy back your unused sick leave. I'd've been dumb not to use it.

Back to work tomorrow for a few more days of toil in the fields of the System.

Comments

[lamentables]

Again, that's an interesting insight. The whole American exceptionalism thing is, needless to say, beyond me too. Some aspects of it, as I've seen it reported/analysed, I find truly astounding.

I'm enjoying this conversation--hope you don't mind!

[darkemeralds]

In The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond puts forth a fascinating idea about the Polynesian and Micronesian tendency to extreme obesity in the face of the modern diet. He points out that only the most naturally fat-retaining individuals were likely to have survived the privation of the long voyage to these tiny islands. The resulting population of the island is highly selected, therefore, for low metabolism and high fat creation and retention. Introduce sugar, and bam!

If you accept that introversion and extraversion are evolved characteristics, heritable and genetic (which there's at least some evidence for), you could make a case that the United States is a kind of Polynesia for extraversion: coming here would have tended to be a choice made by extroverts (Explore! conquer! evade gaming debts! get land! say fuck you to the Church! Whatever!) So we wind up with a population--and therefore a whole culture--heavily weighted towards extraversion, with all the good and bad that that entails.

A great deal of the self-improvement/self-help mania in this country is, essentially, aimed at showing introverts how to be extraverts. I've been delighted to see so much discussion in the last couple of years that gives introversion its due. A quick glance at online articles on the subject, however, shows a discouraging number of "you're not really an introvert" headlines, and "here's how to fix that," and "introversion isn't a real thing" and "you probably don't know what you're talking about."

Sigh.