On my last vacation, I disconnected from the world 100%. One way to tell you’re in an environment designed to separate people from the daily terrors of the real world is that they change the carpetsin the elevators every day to indicate what day it it.
That was a rare treat. Normally, I’m on-call every other week.
When I’m on vacation, I’m on vacation. I don’t check my work email, and they don’t have my personal email. I don’t give anyone at the office a number where I can be reached. I’m gone.
I put “check email once or twice”, but that’s really only after we’ve returned from our trip (3 kids, never vacation at home) so I’m prepped a bit when I come back in. I’m a software engineer at a large tech company.
When I worked at much smaller companies, I’d leave contact info when on vacation, but never checked in myself. Now, I don’t even do that.
That’s what I should have checked, but really I disconnect 100%. On my last couple of vacations I occasionally checked my e-mail becuse I was expecting a non-work related message on my work account.
It really depends on the vacation. I always put an ‘out of office’ message up and let people know of an alternative person, e-mail they can call with an emergency requiring immediate attention, but also list my own number in case it is only something I can deal with.
Most people respect that, but inevitably something comes up while I am on vacation requiring my minimal attention. I say minimal because I do not ever bring a laptop specifically so I CANNOT have my vacation ruined. The nature of the emergency is usually of a “where do find this data or file?” anyway. All of this, of course, assumes that it is a vacation within the country. If I go on an international trip, I do not have an international plan, in which case a few key people get my personal e-mail and they understand that any disaster they need an answer to may take me a few days to answer based on availability of e-mail in that country/hotel/cruiseship.
I work for a defense company as their head proposal and grant writer. I’ve been with the company 10 months. I was with the previous company a year and half until the boss insisted on me taking a laptop and ruined every vacation, weekend, and evening out with constant disasters that he formulated and never discussed with me in advance. Ergo, why I’m no longer at that crap-fest.
Nothing, zip, zero, nada. No e-mail, no voice mail, no work-related phone calls. The whole point of a vacation in the first place is that you’re not at work.
My boss has my personal cell number, but nobody else at work does, and certainly no customers do. If anything truly can’t wait until I get back, they’ll have to find somebody else to do it.
I was on vacation in Newfoundland one time, driving around, and I swear this was my honest-to-god thought process:
“All the houses here look so Canadian, I wonder what makes them so Canadian-looking. Hmm, the garages aren’t front-and-center like American houses. That must be it, American houses are very car-centric with giant garages. I wonder if my house back home has a garage. Hmm, do I even live in a house?”
Seriously, I had to really think to remember what my house looked like, that’s how far I had abandoned my real life while I was on that vacation.
I kind of get that too, but in a slightly different way. I consider Martha’s Vineyard to be my year-round home, I just work off-island for 51 weeks out of the year.
On my last job, I was on-call literally 24/7 as a third-level back up. I didn’t get a lot of calls, but when I did, it meant that everything had gone to hell in a hand basket. It got that I would literally shout “Fuck!” whenever the phone rang during vacation. One time, I had to fly back early from my vacation because my laptop crapped out.
Never again. The day after I quit that job (on good terms), I can’t describe how liberated I felt knowing that I would get a full night’s sleep without the anxiety that the phone *might * ring.
Barrister. Get called all the time. My favourite holiday place is London where incidentally there are also a lot of work related things, so it is normal to spend several hours on work related activities, say a meeting. As it is, Chambers (the firm) is very decent about such stuff, if its a meeting they will arrange it as a dinner in a nice resturant and once a private box at the Royal Opera house, so I ain’t complaining.
I check email and voice mail about once a day on vacation, more if I know there is something brewing.
I’m an administrator at a college, and in a lot of ways I function as a project manager. To me, at least, checking email and voice mail daily and heading off potential issues early is far superior to coming back from vacation and finding a situation that has gone off the rails to the point where it takes a lot of extra work to correct it.
My work email comes to my blackberry. While I’m on vacation I’ll look at it a couple of times per day (assuming I’m not doing something specific), but won’t respond to anything unless I’m 100% sure I’m the only one who can deal with it. Even then, I’ll probably wait a few hours to see if any of my co-workers will take a stab at it.
When I was working tech support, vacations usually meant turning off my phone and burying it in a hole somewhere until I got back. Tech support is great for instilling a deep aversion to telephones and email in a person.
Read the politics section of the news (I work in central government) but I have absolutely no contact with work whatsoever. I don’t have the facility to check work email as I don’t have a laptop/crackberry and I really don’t want one.
I would grudgingly accept that there might be some major crisis and it’s unavoidable that I might get a phone call from someone asking about something that I know that no-one else does, but that’s it (and in fact I can only remember this ever happening once several years ago).
I’m a manager at a state agency. I’m on call 24/7, and unfortunately for me, no one else has both the authority and knowledge to cover for me completely in my absence. I’m lucky if I can go a weekend without getting a phone call about some emergency. I have no chance of getting through a week without an emergency phone call, or receiving an email which requires immediate attention.
I’m a programmer. I don’t have any way of accessing work remotely. The company offers VPN service but I’ve resisted getting it. I live a 15 minute walk from work so if they really need me in an emergency and I can just go into the office. If it’s not worth me going into the office for it’s not an emergency, and if I’m not at home then somebody else can deal with the problem.
I let the work pile up. What’s the point otherwise?
