In the best spirit of the Christmas season, I feel like I should throw out something that doesn’t annoy me this week first. That’s the fact that today marks the Winter solstice for 2023. We’ll now begin seeing incrementally more daylight each day. If that’s not cause for celebration, I don’t know what is.
However, it wouldn’t be Thursday if there weren’t at least a few items to call out as annoyances for the week. As my ultra-long Christmas weekend is now underway, though, I’ve shaved it down to two instead of the normal three and present them to you in no particular order.
1. Calculations. I usually do a reasonably good job at calculating how much leave I have to “use or lose” at the end of the calendar year. I base all of my other leave planning around needing 64 hours to cover the week of Christmas and the week of New Year. The fancy pants automated leave tracker, though, is telling me I’ve unexpectedly miscalculated by approximately 10 and one half hours. If it’s right, it means I could be leaving more than a day’s vacation on the table. If I’m right, it means my use or lose balance for next year will be 10+ hours short. I think I’m right… but not with enough conviction to take a risk of losing vacation time. So I guess my vacation is starting mid-afternoon Thursday instead of at close of business Friday. That part isn’t actually annoying, but having such a large variance in my normally precise end-of-year calculation is, at a minimum, perplexing.
2. One more thing. I’ll never understand the mad rush of some people at this time of year to get just one more thing done before turning out the lights for the year. As I’m plodding through the week, I couldn’t help but notice that there are at least seven separate actions sitting in our tracking database with deadlines between Christmas and New Years. Someone at echelons higher than reality actually looked at those things and thought, “Yup, we absolutely have to have an answer on these absolute nothings before the dawn of 2024.” That’s just the stuff that people have bothered putting in the “official” tracker. The week will be replete with unofficial asks as well. Look, if it’s something involving a hazard to life and property, sure, the holidays are just another few days of the year… but if it’s just standard requests for information, maybe stow it for a week or two until someone might actually give a shit. Otherwise you’ll get what you get… and I promise you it won’t be much.