Monday, August 9, 2010

The timing may be terrible (or perfect, depending on how you see things), but either way I'm about to go on a week-long vacation, my first in two years.

Now, I know some of you are reading that and thinking, Sweet Jeebus, I'd give my left boob/nut/etc for a week-long vacay once a decade! Is she complaining? She'd better not be complaining, while others' internal monologues might sound more like, WTF? Is it even legal not to take a vacation for 2 years?

That is to say, vacation practices vary widely from lab to lab. Mine definitely falls along the more lax end of the spectrum. My boss is way too busy to keep track of what time people come in every day or who's taking what time off when. We get our work done, we tell him when we're planning on going away, and as long as it doesn't conflict with any big experiments, he doesn't care. People in my lab work hard, and I can't think of a single instance in which someone's taken advantage of our laissez-faire 'tude. Case-in-point, yours truly; I didn't feel like I could take time off last summer, so I didn't. Oh sure, a long weekend here or there, but nothing that could be considered a bona fide vacation.

I know that some of you, however, work in environments in which the free-love spirit isn't quite so...flowy as in mine. So how does that all work? Do you have any vacation time defined in your contract? Do you have a contract? Has your boss ever explicitly forbid you from taking a vacation? Do any of you have post-doc associations or unions that have negotiated institution-wide vacation policies? Answers in the comments, please!

All I know is I cannot fucking wait for my vacation. I'm doing nothing but sitting on the beach, reading books for fun (rec's please in comments, email, twitter, etc!) and eating lobster rolls until my arteries cry for mercy.

I was going to embed the video to the Go-Gos "Vacation" here, but the embed code is disabled, to which I say booooo copyrights or whatever. You'll just have to watch it on YouTube.