Well, if it makes you feel any better I’m probably a lot closer to being dead than you are.
Just trying to help.
The newspaper biz is weird; especially for a community weekly (not much hard news, lots of events, interviews w/locals, reviews). Depends on what you do for the paper.
For sales people, the busiest times are right now as they get advertisers for the holidays. The big push started for ad sales last week for December ads. They are out there selling their little hearts out to keep us afloat. They also see a surge in April-June, August and September. We can forget January and February.
For me, the lone writer, I edit the events calendar. August and September are insane. I must get 100 e-mails a day with announcements for festivals and fairs, shows, etc. beginning in late July. August events have really picked up (it used to be a little dead spot), but EVERY STINKING WEEKEND IN SEPTEMBER is filled with events big and small, and I could really put together 3 full pages of events all that month. Now I’m getting announcements for holiday events, and that will escalate in the next week. Everything dies down in January and February, then picks back up a little into spring, then May through June are busy with listings again.
Classified line ads for us boom May through September with garage sale ads and rentals/homes for sale. Other categories stay about the same year round. Mini-ads for home services like landscaping drop out in winter, come back in early spring; same with construction ads.
This is probably more than you wanted to know about running a small newspaper.
Part time groccery cashier/full time student checking in.
Right now we are entering our bussiest time of the year. The entire months of November and December are very hectic, for obvious reasons.
August for us is DEAD. So many people are out of town as the city (DC) effectively shuts down.
Management systems auditing - ISO 9001, ISO 14001, TS 16949, that sort of thing.
This is our busy season right now. Nobody wants to schedule an audit around Christmas or in the summer, because people go on vacation and it’s harder to fit an audit into everyone’s schedule. So we have two peaks; October-November, and February-April. It’s only about a 15-20% jump in workload, but practically speaking for us it’s quite difficult to accomodate.
I’m a paramedic – Actually for us it goes depending on how well staffed we are. Sick people seem to keep calling on a pretty consistent basis. If our company is well staffed and all the scheduled units are up and running, it isn’t too bad. If we’re short on paramedics so several scheduled trucks are not on the street, we get our asses handed to us. It seems to be cyclical. For several months we’ll be well staffed, then a lot of people will leave, and we’ll be short for several months, until the company hires more help.
With 20+ years in retail, you’d think I would say Christmas, and that’s true in terms of sales and number of customers. However, from my perspective, I would have to say back-to-school.
Mostly because it’s before the big hiring push for the holidays, so we are usually short staffed, not to mention the customers at christmas expect the stores to be crazy, but B-t-S catches them by suprise I feel, so they tend to be cranky.
Network and Security Admin for a small IT services company that sells inventory management software to large electrical and automotive part manufacturers.
My busiest periods are whenever we bring on a new customer - it’s mostly my responsibility to make sure their auditors are satisfied with our security procedures. We’re privately owned, so we don’t have to deal with our own SOX-type bullshit, but a lot of our customers are Fortune 1000’s.
My (ahem, I mean my bosses) network is mostly Linux, and all of our main production systems are AIX, so my technical duties are pretty stable, busy-wise. Then again, when somebody accidentally unplugs a 7133 from its UPS, things can get pretty hairy for a couple of days.
Heh! The same for me, and I work for an airline.
Probably election time. Glad that’s about to be over.
Well, first I’ll confess to the (formerly?) cardinal sin of responding without having read all of the last half of the current replies. I don’t think that matters that much in this sort of thread.
Cycles in my industry (oil & gas exploration) were once more predictable. We had the year end budget flush by the big boys and annual price cycles (summer driving season, winter heating oil demand increase) that were somewhat easier to forecast than today’s market.
But the recent upsurge in energy prices is driven by a global increase in demand rather than more localized factors such as vacation schedules or weather. We’ve been running full-tilt since about Spring of '03, and expect to stay that way for the foreseeable future. The end of the fiscal year does not see the annual budget spulrges of former years, but we do still have to get things cleaned up for the year.
That’s just more on the top when the needle’s pegged. So, where there were once cycles, affected largely by other, market, cycles, for the last two and a half years we’ve been running at full speed all of the time.
When I worked in the veterinary office, busy was beginning of summer (get the dogs checked before going on vacation) and end of summer (people always came in for their pet’s annual shots then. Why? I have no idea).
Obviously, when I worked in a mall, the time between November 1 and December 31 was a madhouse. I will say, there was a perverse thrill on Dec 24 being able to say to folks, “Nope. We don’t have it. Probably won’t get any more of it til after the first of the year. Sorry.”