Public Holidays

These are the days all working people in SL very eagerly wait for to get a break from their busy schedules. We probably hold the record for the highest amount of public holidays in any country. 25…yep that’s number of extra days we get to laze around and get paid for. Great isn’t it, nowhere but in good old SL.

My question is do we need all these holidays? I know some people might have drawn their daggers and ready to kill me for saying something so sacrilegious. Hold on to your horses for a minute and think about it. Well there’s a good side and a bad side to it. For one thing it does cause a bit of a headache when dealing with the international community. Even though you’re on holiday it doesn’t mean that they are. It maybe your clients, customers, suppliers or even your bosses, and they keep on working on these days. When you come back the next day your inbox is filled up with messages that it takes the whole day to go through them. There’s another day wasted. Even if we make our schedules and timelines to incorporate these holidays, it does have some kind of impact on productivity. And sometimes people do have to work on these days to accommodate other people involved. After all we are all ‘interconnected’ these days.

It’s true that most of the holidays are for religious reasons, but truthfully how many really spend the whole day doing religious observances. Couple of hour’s maybe, but some doesn’t even do that. I know there are some people who are religious and make use of these holidays in a religious manner and I offer my apologies to them. But most are quiet the opposite. The best we can expect is going out with friends or eat and sleep the whole day. A couch potatoes’ heaven. Some people have of course have found a loophole to get some more money out of their employers. They put off working during the normal days and come to work on holidays to catch up with it. Dedicated employees you might think, but far from it. They only come because they can claim overtime for it which means the companies are paying them twice. And they are not even doing extra work; it is work that could have been completed during the normal work days. But who has time for work when you have two hour lunch breaks, one hour tea breaks and hallway gossip sessions going on. So many things to do and so little time.

My idea is that these holidays be made optional except for the most important of the holidays. The others should be added to the holiday allowance given to employees. This way if someone wants to take a holiday on that day they can, otherwise they can take it some other day that’s convenient for them. This way they have more holidays to take when they really want it. Eventually they’ll be more productive instead of wasting their time on a holiday which they don’t need. For the truly religious they are more than welcome to take the holidays on these days. Otherwise you can accumulate all your holidays and take an extended vacation for about a month or so. Take a good long break and go somewhere far away. Does you a world of good.

Things maybe not like that in the real world but we can still enjoy the holiday. But let’s make it a point to do something useful and not waste it.