January 23, 2015

Stayed The Vacation

As most of you had probably figured out, I was on vacation from work this week (sadly, I'm back there today). Mostly to decompress and recharge the batteries, and partly to act like a schmuck with the general public and be uncle-social to the family. But I bet you're wondering just exactly what I did on my vacation.

Well...I did this:

1} Blogged. For a rare treat, I had enough time to actually write three blog posts this week, with two of them being a flashback style post, in which I was both windy and erudite.

2} Facebooked. For an even rarer treat, I had enough time to goof off on Facebook. I gained a friend, lost a friend, gained a page like and lost a page like.

3} Wrote. Not necessarily fresh new stuff, although I decided to make serious attempt at doing that on Thursday (epic fail), but I did yet another round editing (see Monday's post for that), gained another beta reader and basically made a menace of myself with my muse.

4} Read. I caught up on some reading. I finished a short story horror anthology by John Lindqvist called "Let The Old Dreams Die", which was basically contained some hits and some misses. I also finished a big ol' non-fiction book about the hacker group Anonymous, which was pretty decent.

5} Wrote More. Not regular writing or blogging, but took a crack at writing another book review (success!). I have a short list of books that I really need to write reviews on and the longer I wait, the less I feel like doing it, especially since I finished most of these books at the end of last summer/beginning of fall.

6} Work. I took the liberty of checking my work e-mail on a daily basis, at least three times a day. Why? Because the last thing I wanted to do was to wade through 300+ e-mails the first day back. And how did I arrive at the number? On the average, I had at least 25 e-mails waiting for me whenever I logged in, so roughly 65 per day for the five days I was out will get you to that figure, give or take. By the way, on the last time that I had logged in to my work e-mail (around 3p) I had a total of 79 e-mails that I had either flagged or need to print out for future use.

And that, my friends is what I did on my staycation. And no, I'm not really ready to face the toddlers at my job, but it's a living.

(c) 2015 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.

14 comments:

  1. I always check my work email when i'm off too, for exactly the same reason!

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    1. Oh man, it was never ending. The e-mails really didn't stop until about 2 in the afternoon. It was just one after another after another.

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  2. In other words, right now is the suckiest part of your day.
    That's a lot of emails that need attention. You're right though, better than wading through hundreds at once.

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    1. It was extremely sucky as apparently I did a monumental screwup before I left on vacation. Normally, I'm very conscientious about my job, but because of this screwup, I'm now owing someone big time.

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  3. Well it sounds like you had a good break doing what you enjoy. Shame work gets in the way of having fun, but that's life I suppose.

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    1. I had a great time. In fact, I should answer my e-mails more often from home. Way less stress and I actually sound very pleasant to talk to.

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  4. I left the workplace in 2000. Believe it or not at least half of the workforce did not use email or even know what it was.

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    1. When I entered the office environment in 1996, that was the first time I learned to use e-mail. Back then, the internet was in its infancy and I had to have someone teach me how to send a fax.

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  5. Glad you had some time off, even if you did check email.

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    1. It was desperately needed, although it's put me another couple weeks behind (like I wasn't already behind to begin with).

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  6. That sounds like a pretty good stay-cation. I try not to log onto my work e-mail when I'm away, if I can help it, because it just gets me worrying about work stuff, but I see your point. It is easier if you don't have to face the whole back-log at once on your first day back.

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    1. It was indeed. Recharged, refreshed and decompressed. Definitely allowed me to tweak my work attitude for the rest of the year as well.

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