I assumed SciFiSam was kidding. (“If it falls on a Sunday”?)
Yes, I phrased that badly. But in the UK, if a bank holiday (public holiday) falls on a weekend day then the next Monday is a day off, and Easter Monday is a day off in itself. So, for example, if New Year’s Day falls on a Saturday, the next Monday is still a bank holiday.
Thanks, I did not know that!
woooooooooosh…
Do you guys also get Boxing Day off nowadays or has it become one of those “everything goes on sale” says? The former Crown of Aragon gets both off; back when Pentecostes was celebrated on the actual day, the day after it as well.
Boxing day is a Bank Holiday so if someone has to work they will get time off in lieu and possibly additional pay. Not every shop does Boxing Day sales, in my city it’s the big shopping centre only. In practice large sections of the workforce are off from Christmas Day to the 2nd December, either because they are using their holiday days or because their workplace shuts down anyway as no one will be there 
The major exceptions are essential services, of course, and retail.
That’s also true in the US but most of the holidays are fixed days of the week. (Most are on Mondays and Thanksgiving is Thursday.)
By my reckoning that works out to 343 days of holiday per year. :eek: 
I work at a hotel. We have security guards. Every once in a while we need to replace one. About 80% of them quit after the first night when they realize the have to do actual security guard stuff - like handle noise complaints or walk the property - instead of sitting at a desk and pushing a buzzer. And the company tells them our requirements in advance!
I don’t have a great example handy but my wife has one.
She’s worked in biostatistics in the pharma industry for twenty years, Neither she nor anyone she knows will hire someone from academia (obviously they hire educated people, just not people who WORK in education.) The reason is simple; they’re insanely lazy. She has tried them out, and know other managers who have, and people who have worked a long time in academia simply will not work forty hours a week. They will start taking afternoons off, days off, often without telling anyone, literally in the first week, and no amount of coaching will compel them to work full time.
A few years ago I joined a pharma company too, and totally without me bringing it up, my boss mentioned he no longer hired anyone from academia, because they just will not show up to work. It’s as predictable as the sun rising in the East.
Ooh yeah, I forgot about that one. I worked security for a bit and got one guy fired after his first shift. It was site security while setting up for a festival; really simple, the site manager was staying in a caravan onsite, so we were literally there to make sure no-one nicked the generators or other equipment while he slept. All we had to do was stay awake and present, maybe have the odd leg stretch and ‘patrol’ but that was optional as the site was either pitch black or spotlit, so we’d be able to see any lights or people near the valuables. We were even allowed to bring our cars onsite and sit in them reading or watching stuff.
An hour in, the new guy had not just nodded off in his car, he’d full on gone to bed. He’d reclined the seat right back, taken his shoes off and was hiding from the lights under his coat, sound asleep. I turfed the lazy git out, but he genuinely didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He apparently always slept on overnight security shifts, because nothing ever happened, and as soon as I walked off, he happily went straight back to sleep :smack:
This thread has been cathartic for me. The new lawyer I was training for the past two weeks just quit on Friday, and I’m so relieved I nearly danced for joy. (He probably would have been fired eventually, but it would’ve taken a while, and I would’ve had to keep working with him in the meantime.) His deficiencies weren’t nearly as egregious as most of what’s been described here so far, but he sucked at legal reasoning, expected to work 9-5 (uncommon in the profession, and he was explicitly told during the interview, and again by me on the first day of training, that 12-hour days are the norm at least for the first 6 months), and felt uncomfortable defending drug addicts (we defend parents accused of abusing or neglecting their children; the drug users are the easiest clients to sympathize with!) Actually, I’m not sure if he was being honest about that last one, since it only came up in his one-on-one with the boss, when he was being counseled for repeatedly failing to meet deadlines. Pretty much all the attorneys in the office come to me instead of the boss when they’re afraid they’ve screwed up or are about to screw up; whether it’s because of my personality or just because I don’t have the power to fire them, the consensus seems to be that I’m the more approachable person, so I’m skeptical that this guy was afraid to voice those concerns to me first. But either way, not gonna work out in this line of work.
Man, I’m in the wrong academic discipline. A week under 50 hours is unusual.
Oh Lord I meant 2nd January
There has only been one academic who has joined my team in recent years (and he works really hard), so I can’t vouch for your claim. But I totally believe it. People who bail the academic ship tend not to be very competitive (raises hand). They aren’t the kind of folks who enjoying putting in long days at the office. So it can be a big adjustment to go from the pressure cooker known as the tenure track to the “real world”. I can see how someone might go crazy with all the new freedom in their life and never regain their senses.
Also, it can be an adjustment going from an environment where you don’t have to clock your hours and where you can spend all day surfing the web to an environment where you’re comings and goings are noticed, along with what you do on your computer.
That’s because Nov 1 is All Saint’s Day
When I was working in Contract Compliance at my last job, we had a new hire show up and leave at the lunch break … this is for a job where we generally worked with boilerplate contracts, faxing them to the various people and getting them back, and sorting them into files - I think I only modified seriously 5 contracts in a 1 year period, and almost never had any problem calls with yelling customers unlike working in a call center [I once had to call the security director of a major banking chain to let him know that one branch in a major city had been left unlocked and unalarmed between 6 pm and 0230 when it rolled onto my alert screen, that was the time the bank was to be re-alarmed by the cleaning crew, their cleaning deadline I guess one could call it. Cleaning crew never actually showed up, which was an issue in that branch.]
Person doing job for eight years. Interested in that job and no more. Department shrinks to a team of two from a team of five or more over the years. Had her report to a new manager, as some other processes and legal requirements meant she needed to be managed by someone with proper authority over taxes and certain financial standards now in place.
Your job is not changing. However, due diligence requires that you work in X department for a manager trained and certified in Y. You get better support. Your job: Not changing. Intro to new boss: Your job is not changing. Everyone: Your job is not changing.
Goes home, writes pages-long email about needing a new job description, and doesn’t understand how she will have time to learn new job. “I’m too busy for my job now!”
From all angles: Your job is not changing. Because we operate in X environment now financially, we must be diligent and have you report to a new manager.
I NEED MY NEW JOB DESCRIPTION! I’M ALREADY TOO BUSY!
Wow, I have seen this thread all along and have so many anecdotes to add but I’m afraid to start for fear I couldn’t stop!
One I’ve seen more than once is a new employee starting, working a few weeks or days, not showing up for days or weeks and then clocking in for work one morning as if they thought no one would notice.
I once had a tenant who worked three days at a new restaurant, then was sick for four days. Actually sick, not goofing off, but he didn’t call. Dude was surprised when he went back to work and didn’t have a job.