
It’s rough coming back to the office after a week off. My Borg implants have been offline so long that they didn’t really want to reconnect to the work Collective this morning. But the nearly 200 e-mails sitting in my work inbox forced my hand in that regard. Stupid inbox. Thankfully, many of the e-mails were stray spam messages about hot Russian love slaves and discounts on herbal supplements to increase my virility and girth…you know, for the Russian love slaves I’m being sent. It’s all those non-spam messages that are now causing me to suffer from a “case of the Mondays.”
I suppose I could have lessened the stress by checking my work e-mail when I got home on Saturday…but I just couldn’t do it. No. I wouldn’t do it. I know that some with whom I went to the beach did this. And some actually checked their work e-mail while at the beach (ahem…you know who you are). Here’s the thing, though. I’m paid to do my job at the office. I do this very thing 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. When I’m on vacation, I’m using my hard-earned leave to enjoy time away from work. Why, then, would I check my work e-mail while I am on vacation?
We’re just work-stupid in this country. Do you know that other countries make fun of our paltry vacation policies? They make fun of us for other things as well, but that’s par for the course anymore, right? They also make fun of us for our “working vacation” mentalities. That’s well-deserved mockery, if you ask me. What do any of us do for a living that would require this kind of on-call 24/7 mentality (beyond doctors, that is; doctors and maybe magicians)? True, I’d like to think that I’m an integral gear in the machinery of my office, but every gear’s got to take a breather now and again before all their cogs snap off and they’re just spinning uselessly.
I still feel a bit like I’m spinning uselessly, but that’s okay. It takes at least one full business day to slip back into the swing of things, right? It’ll all work out. And hopefully I’ll be able to eke out a bit more time to work on all those book challenge posts I accumulated last week. They’re coming, denizens. I swear. Trust LobaBlancus of Borg. We will come through for you.