> What is this thing you call "vacation"?
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> When I was a young lad our farm had several milk cows that expected to see us first thing every morning and again in the late afternoon. I swore I would never be a dairy farmer because of this consistent demand for my attention. Things ran somewhat smoothly for a few decades. THEN SOME DAMM FOOL INVENTED THE CELL PHONE!!!!!!!!!!!
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> As a one professional shop there isn't much that can go on without my involvement. That next call may be from the best future client I have never met or it may be the crazy lady who didn't like the results of the survey we completed OVER A YEAR AGO.
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> I will check all three numbers for messages at least twice per day. Once shortly before noon and again shortly before normal end of work. I will respond to those of merit. Everyone else is left hanging until my return to the office. Well, except those who happen to know my personal cell number, which is a short list.
How many are you calling Several? I used to help milk 50-60 each on my Grandpa's place and on my Uncle's place.
Later one of my cousins and myself milked for a dairy for two weeks so that family could take a vacation.
B-)
Several. You know, somewhere from three to eight depending on which ones were fresh. Your basic dirt floor, milking by hand in a drafty old barn with only two caught in the stanchions at a time. If milking the one closest to the exit door where one of our cats liked to sit and watch, the fun part was squirting fresh milk at the cat.....until Dad would catch me and remind me what it felt like to have a boot strike your posterior region.
Been sort of an employee most of my career so once I hit the timeclock don't bother me.
Only two exceptions, when working for a company where I had partial ownership, I'd keep tabs on stuff and occasionally work an off-clock overnighter or weekend fire drill (until it was every damn week!), and the next company (90 employees) later, stupidly rented an apartment across the alley from the office, where we were running a clustered VAX 30 terminal VANGO system with Calcomp flatbed plotters and tape-drive based storage. Somehow over the years the odd call to go over and change tapes at 2:00 in the morning turned into two trips a night weekdays, and refilling the ink wells and putting new rolls of mylar in the CalComps to boot, and 8 hours Saturday fixing plots, and getting calls from crews at 5:30 in the morning that forgot their office keys and needed their truck keys on their desks, and yada-yada.
Later I became a quasi-supervisor elsewhere, and made it clear a call after hours or on weekends, vacations, etc. was verboten, unless the building or my house was on fire. Set it up with a smart minion who could handle pretty much everything, and a good owner who could handle the big deal after hours calls. Smart minion filled my job when I left.
I guess my point is unless you're a 3 man shop on the edge don't let your job overwhelm your life. Most of my multi day vacations are out of cellphone range anyways so it don't matter.