My current job at a brokerage firm is incredibly busy at the end of the year. However, I’ve worked in places where the entire office was on auto pilot and only a skeleton crew worked the last part of December.
How is your job at the end of the year?
Dead. Completely. Which isn’t good as i’m a contractor so when I don’t work I don’t get paid, usually picks up in the New Year though so i’m just trying to enjoy my time off at the moment.
We are extremely busy the week before Christmas and extremely busy again the week before New Years. Part of that is because we sell seafood. Off the top of my head, I think nearly a quarter of our seafood sales are in the last two weeks of the year.
I work at a Las Vegas resort. New Years season is absolutely freakin’ crazy. We’re talking mandatory 12 hour shifts for literally every employee in the department, including the executive director.
The organisation I work for sells software, and is a very quarter-driven business. The last full week before Christmas is manic, with everyone trying to close deals before the end of the quarter/end of the year. Then it essentially shuts down till early January.
However, I work in the Education department and we are dead as anything from the middle of December to the first proper week in January, when it usually picks up again with a vengeance. It’s nice, I don’t mind working between Christmas and New Year - I tend to do a lot of filing and tidying up in preparation for the New Year. It’s a very relaxed time, nobody does their full days, we do a lot of hanging around and chatting. There’ll be music on in the office, someone will bring in some chocolates, that kind of thing. It feels less like work than at any other time of the year. (It probably helps that we’ve mostly known each other for a few years at least and that I like pretty much all of my colleagues).
Busy, but mainly because this is the time of year when we’re constantly down 3+ people a day due to vacations. It’s a production department, so the rest of us take up the slack. We’re currently working 2+ hours overtime every day and, with the exception of holiday weekends, we come in on Saturdays as well.
I am reading and posting on the dope while my boss is looking at shoes and purses.
Not. I’m out of a gig as of Thursday.
The week between Christmas and New Year’s, extremely slow and about as quiet as can be. By Christmas, we’ve got pretty much all our year-end projects finished. And even if we did have a lot of projects to work on, many of the people that we deal with are out of town for the holidays and we probably wouldn’t have much luck reaching them anyway. It starts picking up again about a week or two after the New Year. In the meantime, as another poster mentioned, we do stuff like tidy up around our cubicles, update our contact lists and start doing research for possible projects after the holidays.
Most of our company is dead - the parking lot is less than half full and most people are at home with their kids. However, because our department deals with Medicare, and benefits roll over and re-set on January 1 every year, we’re insanely busy. We do over 50 percent of our business during this time of year.
Next year annual enrollment has been moved up to end before end-of-year holidays, but I’m guessing there will be a LOT of confusion, which may lead to an even busier end of year. It’s hard to tell. Assuming Medicare keeps the earlier enrollment period and doesn’t move it around any more after that, 2012 should be easier.
The last two weeks of this year have been slack as always (to the point where I easily got leave), but I voted ‘busy’ because we are insanely busy until just when the shipping/receiving department of our main customer shuts down for the last two weeks of the year. The last three quarters of this year have been really stressful because of the economic boom in Germany - customers ordering more, and suppliers struggling to supply us in time.
Things slack off in my office around the holidays - a trickle-down effect, I suppose - but I mostly came in here to point out how fun it is to guess what industry people work in based on 1) current business pace and 2) jargon involved in their post.
Hope you land on your feet, VunderBob. 
I work at a trading firm and it is extremely slow. Exchange volumes are minuscule. Maybe 50% of traders in my office are here today.
I’m a periodicals librarian - all the 2009 issues have got to go RIGHT NOW. We have a few thousand magazine subscriptions. That means we have to go through the hanging files and pull out every 2009 issue (and check it to make sure that the issues in the 2009 files are actually from 2009), sort them, box them up for various state institutions (the men’s prison does not get American Cheerleader, for example) and edit our holdings to reflect that. It’s dirty, dusty, a giant pain in the ass, and it’s absolutely essential. I’m in charge of it.
I’m a stay-at-home mom, so this is the busiest time of the year. Summer is easy. Christmas hopping with the six year old is not.
But I recognize I have it much easier than my daughter, who works in a liquor store. That’s a nightmare!
My job, this time, is pretty slow all the time. Not much difference, other than scheduling changes to cover the holidays and vacatino (we’re 24/7 365).
My last job, the last half of December through January was insane, non-stop run run run go go go no time to sit and chat!! Printing bonus checks, seasonal payroll and then W2’s and tax paperwork was absolutly crushing in amount of work.
I miss some of the folks there, but I don’t miss the work at all!
My old company had this week off. We don’t get it with the new owners, so I’m here to preserve my vacation. It is great, since very little email and I can get to those projects that have been on the back burner for a while. And, no traffic.
Yup, it’s slow. Most of our clients are away for the holidays. Makes me look really bad in the timesheet department, damn 15-minute increments.
Vicious. I’m writing up charitable activities for a membership organization and (1) they do a ton of stuff this time of year, with the reporting period stretching roughly from Veterans Day through early Christmas stuff and (2) I’m stuffing 2+ weeks of writing into 8 working days.
I’m on semester break for two weeks, so not much teaching is getting done until Jan. 4.