Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich for January 04, 2011

The downside of being employed.

C’mon, MLK day is only a couple weeks away.

In what world does anyone but government employees and bankers get MLK off? A real case of discrimination, if you ask me. I have a dream that that too will become a REAL holiday, somehow, some way, some day. (Sorry, indignation lapsed into Broadway.)

Employed people are such whiners.

I’ve heard foreigners joke that Americans seem to declare public holidays at the drop of a hat, but they generally drop the subject when I remind them that we have far fewer paid vacations than just about anyone else (at least in developed countries). On the whole, we still end up working more days per year than our major trading partners.

Personally, I think we should limit the closed-office public holidays to a handful of the biggies (maybe July 4, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving), but mandate that everybody gets a number (say, seven, so it totals twelve) of “floating holidays” (separate from vacation time) to use at their discretion. If you want to take Yom Kippur and Rosh Hoshannah off, fine. If you want to take Columbus Day off, fine. If you want to take Ash Wednesday and Good Friday off, fine. If you want to take MLK Day off, fine. Days on which MOST people would likely want off, like Christmas, would of course require skeleton crews at public offices, but (hopefully) business would be slower by proportion.

Everyone gets the same allowance for religious holidays/secular observances according to their beliefs and/or convenience, but they can’t necessarily piggy-back on someone else’s.

Radish the artist with the Employment Catch-22.

This is one of the rare reasons it’s great to be a teacher …provided you’re not stuck using the time off to grade a huge backlog of papers. The hardest time is that long stretch between spring break and Memorial Day.