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When We Want To Posting Date: Dec 10 2007 12:52AM I’m not sure I even have to write this column. It is December, after all, and that means making allowances for the holidays, steering clear of social obligations, and working around tasks like decorating and baking. And then there’s the weather. It’s downright unreliable once you get within a few weeks of January, so you have to do your best to avoid planning or doing anything at the same time as a snowstorm. Under the circumstance, it’s probably best to just lay low and defer pretty much everything until the Spring.
Of course, when Spring does arrive, so does Easter and that means we get Good Friday off. There’s also the uncertainty of Easter Monday. Some people get the time, others don’t, so it’s best just to avoid that whole week, just to be safe. On the Victoria Day long weekend, everyone goes away or opens the cottage or whatever, so usually people take the Friday and even Thursday before as vacation days, and also probably the Tuesday after and you wouldn’t want to be too active on the Wednesday before because people need to pack and maybe even leave that night to beat the traffic out of the city.
Once you hit June, things get a lot more relaxed even without an official holiday because the kids are getting out of school earlier and earlier these days and then people start taking vacations and booking time off around the Summer long weekends. If you want to get something done, it’s probably best to avoid June and July for sure and definitely the last half of August when it’s back-to-school time and everyone’s focused on family and squeezing out the last few moments of enjoyment before the freedom of Summer vanishes into the nose-to-the-grindstone routine of the Fall.
Except, of course, you need to allow people to get home after Labour Day and back into their routines, and that takes a little while. There’s also the complicating factor that September is a minefield of Jewish holidays, so you want to be sensitive to that. Frankly, it’s just safer to nudge things into October where all you have to worry about is Thanksgiving in Canada and then Hallowe’en. Really though, you want to watch out for that because a lot of people travel for Thanksgiving to be with their families and then Hallowe’en is the second busiest adult party day after New Year’s Eve and since the Hallowe’en party probably gets pushed to the Saturday before Hallowe’en, you need to keep that in mind as well.
November is actually a good time, unless of course, you care about Remembrance Day, which you really should. And there’s American Thanksgiving in there, which is huge because it’s pretty much four days long, what with the weekend and the shopping day in there. November is also the time for the Grey Cup, so you don’t want to disturb football fans late in the month.
That takes you back into December and we know that whole month is a no-go, so it’s best to just look at January but people need time to recover from the holidays and get back into the swing of things and then February hits and it’s Reading Week for the universities and then there’s March Break for the schools and really, that doesn’t leave a whole lot of options.
And I haven’t even mentioned Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, election day and the weekend when we leap forward into Daylight Saving Time. Finally, you can’t realistically expect anyone to do actual work on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons, within fifteen minutes of any meal break, or in the first half hour or last half hour of a shift because people are just getting going or getting ready to pack up and leave.
By my calculations, there are 249 official work days in every calendar year, but really only about seventeen minutes when you can realistically expect people to be working.
Is this a great country, or what? Now if only we could adopt the siesta as part of our normal Canadian work day, we could really get some work done. |
