It's Over...

Today is the last day of the holiday shutdown. 2+ weeks of guilt free time off of work!

Photo by Kieran White on Unsplash

About 2 PM on Friday, December 22, it was clear that the shutdown was in flight, so I shutdown the work laptop, and began the annual ritual.

Usually, it works out to about a week and a half of time off (combination of holiday days, and “required” PTO. This is a great thing. Why? because when I take time off for a vacation, I come back to a wall of bullshit to deal with, that is if they hadn’t found me during my time off to ask some inane question that could have waited.

Now, because all 77K of us (minus a very tiny skeleton crew to keep essential things happening, and some of the sales team, because that is how they roll) are off the clock, I come back to a relatively clean email inbox, and no fires burning.

This year, to help reduce our OpEx, we were told to take three more days off. Instead of starting back on Wednesday, January 3, we stretched it through Friday the 5th.

Many people naturally took the extra days off in the past to make it a full week, and that led to a “gentle” return, where activities are on a slow ramp, sorta “soft” restart to ease into work. I usually worked those days, but I can now say I prefer the extra time off!

Alas, that time is up. It is currently Sunday morning, January 7th, and I am contemplating pulling the laptop out of the backpack and getting it on the charger to fire it up to be ready for Monday.

This morning I also opened our internal messaging platform (WebEx Teams, yeah, working at Cisco means we use our own products) and in 2+ weeks, not a single message was inbound.

Yesssssssss

Holiday time is great to have off.

Alas, tomorrow I will have an 8:00 AM staff meeting. Oh well, all good things must come to an end.

Last licks

Today, I will take down the Christmas lights, and help the wife pack them until next year.

I am in the middle of open guitar surgery, and the parts I will need to finish it off will arrive tomorrow via USPS parcel. Looking forward to getting the git-box back in working condition.

My car is filthy. I had hoped to have enough nice days to do a full strip/polish/seal/wax treatment to the paint, but we had just enough rain here to not make that feasible. I will just punt and take it to the local car wash.

I might also stop by Guitar Center. I *need* a strap, but really I want to do some window shopping. Last time I was there, I almost walked out with a Martin series X acoustic. I must remain strong.

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