Who Works During the Holidays?

While sitting here at my computer, plugging away at tending the bin, I started wondering who else might be hard at work, instead of enjoying what most in the world (especially in America) would consider "the Holidays". I've stumbled into working this season for the second year in a row, and I find myself not bothered much by it at all. If you had asked me even 5 years ago if I would give up my Christmas vacation for work, I would have laughed and answered with a resounding "No!". Have any of you fallen into similar behavior? As an aside, what Holidays do many of you find yourselves working, whether it be Christmas, Thanksgiving, or some other Holiday, what drives you to work when others are enjoying their time off?

People who enjoy their jobs

[tepes]

It might piss people off, but my job is what I would be doing if I was independently wealthy. I work during holidays because it's just too much fun to miss.!

token jew at the ISP

[zzyzx]

For 2 years during my tech support days, I was Seanet's token jew employee. I was the only person who would work that day, manning all of the phones. In 1995, it was all worth it. Seanet is located on the 68 floor of what was then called the Columbia Tower. That day a thick fog had rolled into Seattle. When I got into the office, the view was amazing. You couldn't see the city below, but you could see the Cascades (and the occasional top of a building) poking through the clouds below. I spent the day watching that, blissfully unbothered by customers - apparently no one wanted to call an ISP on Christmas.

I'm a physician

[ccmay]

I get no choice. Until people quit getting sick on their days off I will have to keep taking care of them.

That said, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are traditionally covered by our Jewish colleagues.

-ccm

Work at home: work all the time

[tinahdee]

That's the thing about working in a home office. You're always at work, even if you're sick, even if it's a holiday. Especially at my home, because it's small and we're in the middle of a perpetual remodel job. My main computer and desk are not removed from the chaos of life, and so my work life and my home life are hopelessly intertwined.
It's not so bad, though. My fellow staff members are kind of like members of the family, always right there in IRC, every day.

Tina
news editor / reporter
newsforge.com

The Professors Are In

[alansz]

As one set of research grant deadlines for major U.S. Federal agencies fall early in the year (NSF: Jan 15, NIH: Feb 1), most Decembers find me plugging away.

For those of us in academia, especially on the tenure-track, "holidays" often mean "when you're not teaching and can get around to writing up your papers or grant proposals", although I'm pleased to say that I'm also getting to travel to see my family (hooray for the laptop and the spread of home broadband).

- Alan, Asst Professor of Clinical Decision Making

Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

I will study and hack the Mozilla code during the weekend. Lots of bugs there to fix and take care of. Very fun.

Bullshit

[null etc.]

This post is fucking bullshit. After having tried to submit various *legitimate* posts to SlashDot during the last year, each with perfect spelling, great grammar, and insightful information, each has been rejected. But drivel like this shit gets through. How fucking lame, SlashDot moderators. Have a nice fucking holiday.

Disney World, fire fighters and police officers...

[coyote-san]

When I was a kid, I never knew when we would open presents was because my father was a firefighter who often pulled Christmas duty. Most years we celebrated a day or two early... probably because I still remember that one year we didn't....

By the time my father was senior enough to regularly have the holidays off, I was working at Disney World and low enough on the pecking order (seasonal, HS or college age) that I always worked during the peak holiday hours.

I've always found it interesting how indifferent people are to this. I'm not sure if it's a defense mechanism (against guilt), or something else. The Duke University book on Disney World even mentioned this - one researcher visited on Thanksgiving Day and noted just how disconnected most people were between their holiday and the way they treated the people who had to work.

My girlfriend, making sure you stay warm..

[Teun]

My girlfriend is on her oil platform in the North Sea, making sure we stay warm and can drive our cars.
(She works as a Radio / Helicopter landing officer)
I was lucky and just cought the last chopper to the beach from another rig :-)

Re:I worked today.

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually have off today - I worked thanksgiving. I was even in a good mood and didn't write anybody a ticket just gave verbal warnings all day. Just like the hospital those of us that pin the tin star/shield on our shirts don't ever have a day where the whole office is closed.... "thank you for calling 911, we are closed for the holiday please leave a message at the tone."

n3mcb Andy

Non-christian folks

[alanak]

A lot of people forget that there are many americans that don't celebrate christmans. For example, my family. Coming from a Hindu background, we don't celebrate christmas or Thanksgiving. And hence, my dad being a physician often works today without a second thought.

I'm currently a college student, and hence don't work. But when I do get into the job market, It doesn't matter what particular days I get off, just as long as I get some vacation time.

What's got to suck are the pilots/flight attendants/airport employees that are helping my mom come home today and they can't celebrate holidays even if they wanted to.

And us non-christians...

[farrellj]

I'm always willing to work Christmas Eve and Christmas, as long as I can get my Pagan holidays off...the Solstices, Equinoxes, and Cross-quarter days (those inbetween the Solstices, Equinoxes).

Blessed Be, and Brigit Bless
Farrell McGovern,Druid.

I wish I had a choice...

[KGB Kenny]

I'm in the US Coast Guard, and I've worked 2 out of the last three christmas's (I hope I plurarlized that right).

If I had a choice, I'd be home with my wife as its her first christmas away from her folks. Merry Christmas (and Happy Holidays) to all the other military personnel, netadmins, sysadmins, and every other *admin out there working on this time for joy.

Merry Chrstmas
ET3 William J Kenny III, USCG

Euro

[Deu]

I am suprised no one mentioned the Euro, I work for a Bank in Ireland and althought no one is working tonight. The are people in the rest of the holidays. The way some people are going on about it you would have thought somebody just happend to mention to them about it on Friday. We aren't Even one of the major banks here so I would have thought all across Europe more People will be either working or oncall. More in line with what happened for Y2K than a normal festive season

Re:Holidays are useful resources

[BrookHarty]

As I result I've done a LOT of server and network upgrades over Thanksgivings, Labor Days, Memorial Days, etc.

Whoa! Working for a phone/wireless data company, I can tell you that is the WORST time to do work. We have black out periods where we cant even touch the hardware/software. And every major holiday is a black out period.

We have police, fire departments, public saftey, delivery services, etc all counting on reliable communications for these critical times.

The best time for us, is late, really late, like 3am eastern time. You can only do so much with clustering, if you have to patch or fix a service/service, its either customer or convenance, and customers pay the bills.

What's worse?

[ToasterTester]

I don't know which is worse, having to work a shift on a holiday or being on-call. Working a shift you know when you can be with friends and family. On-call you never know when you might have to leave, or how far you can travel. I prefer working a shift, but others say the odd of being called when on-call is slim so they like that. I don't know.

Re:And us non-christians...

[Zachary Kessin]

Speeking as a religous Jew this year someone might have had a good cause to take off today (25 Dec) its the 10th of Tevet, which is a fast day. Now this is a day when you can go to work but working while fasting is not fun. For me its a moot point, I lost my job in September and am about to go back to finish college.

I however would take off for Rosh Hashana (2 days), Yom Kippor (1 day), Sukkot (2 days), Shimini Azzert and Simcas Torah (2 days), Passover (2 days at least) Shavous (2 days) and leave early on Fridays to be home by sundown during the winter. Thankfully I got to Brandeis where they give you all those off anyway. When I start working again it will cut into my vacations rather a lot I would imagine.

And yes I did fast from sunup to sundown today.

Euro

[rde]

Here in Europe, we're getting a new currency next week. And gosh darn it, that mean's that I've got to be in work. For the last few weeks, I've needed to be in from 3am every day, and that'll continue until the end of the year. The bright side is we'll have a cool, new pan-European currency at the end of it.

It's funny how you don't appreciate how much work goes into changing a currency until you've got to update the software on tens of thousands of terminals across Europe.

Of course, this is a once-off. It'll never happen again. Just like the night of 31-12-99 that I spent in front of a bank of computers.

Personality traits visible in writing style

[Bob_Robertson]

Dear A.C.,

Unfortunately, basic personality traits come through in writing style quite clearly, and very quickly.

If these three A.C. postings were actually made by the same person, which seems likely since they're of the same style, you can be mostly assured that you would not in fact ever be an employee of mine.

Self confidence is a good trait, it leads to success. Arrogance overlayed on stupidity usually leads only to profanity.

Bob-

UPDATE: The Register's server is still up, but...

[Tsar]

I directly accessed The Register [theregister.co.uk] using their IP address (213.40.196.64) [213.40.196.64] and found that the server was still up, but that the home page carries a last update timestamp of 24 December at 15:29 GMT—over a day and a half ago.

So not only has the domain name [www.nic.uk] been detagged [www.nic.uk], it appears that the site itself has gone into hibernation as well. Does anyone have any other information about what's going on over there?

EXTRA: I found this excellent post on Usenet, and append it here for your edification:



From: Anthony Edwards ([e-mail] [mailto])
Subject: Re: some one does not like THEREGISTER.CO.UK
Newsgroups: uk.net
Date: 2001-12-25 14:04:27 PST

On Tue, 25 Dec 2001 20:09:06 +0000, in uk.net Rob Harvey <[e-mail]> wrote:

>
>What's also interesting is that the whois doesn't show a "Registered on" date
>which I believe means the name itself is pre-nominet and didn't have an expiry
>date.
>

The Register's first issue was Number 1, 25 July 1994 (Nominet began in 1996 I believe). In those days it was an email newsletter, the first issue can be viewed at:

http://194.159.40.109/reg1.txt

In fact, issues 1-37 can be viewed at the above site, simply by placing the relevant issue number in "reg*.txt".

However it appears that, at least up until 8 November 1996 (issue 37), the domain name theregister.co.uk was not in use. Indeed, the site was at http://www.hubcom.com/register/ , although it seems that John Lettice and Mike Magee also at that point owned the domain theregister.com (albeit they don't now).

One wonders what has happened to theregister.co.uk to cause the domain to become detagged. It is hard to believe that it is a simple financial matter, given the relatively small sums involved. I notice that the identity of the person who apparently requested the detagging (presumably via the Nominet Automaton) is an employee of uk.psi.com. Since all such detagging requests (from Nominet members to Nominet) have to be PGP signed, one imagines that request at least was genuine (but see below).

Up until around September 2001, The Register's hardware was co-located at one of Level 3's UK facilities. Following a variety of technical problems relating to Cisco load balancing equipment, the site was moved I believe, although I am unable to remember who the new hosting centre is. I have a sneaking suspicion that it *is* now PSI, in which case I imagine there will be much embarrassment all round.

On the other hand, there may be a little more to it. The Register have roundly slated the bulk email operation behind the recent Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines spam incidents, pointing out in no uncertain terms (and to Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines too, one imagines) that the email addresses used were definitely culled from Usenet.

However, consider this:

>Received: by jupiter (mbox topflite)
> (with Cubic Circle's cucipop (v1.31 1998/05/13) Sun Dec 16 13:34:37 2001)
>X-From_: [e-mail] Sun Dec 16 13:24:33 2001
>Return-Path: <[e-mail]>
>Received: from blaster1.peel.com ([216.52.138.23])
> by jupiter.nildram.co.uk (8.10.0-mysql/8.10.0) with ESMTP id fBGDOWC28607
> for <[e-mail]>; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 13:24:32 GMT
>Delivered-To: <[e-mail]>
>Received: by blaster1.peel.com (Postfix, from userid 0)
> id 6D65261DC; Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)
>To: [e-mail]
>From: "Virgin Wines" <[e-mail]>
>Reply-To: [e-mail]
>Mime-Version: 1.0
>Content-Type: text/plain
>Subject: Great Christmas wine at a bargain price
>Message-Id: <[e-mail]>
>Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 06:24:28 -0600 (CST)

mail from: [e-mail] in the SMTP envelope, and a Reply-To address
of [e-mail]. However:

Dig [e-mail] (216.52.138.3) ...
Authoritative Answer
Recursive queries supported by this server
Query for peel.net type=255 class=1
peel.net MX (Mail Exchanger) Priority: 10 returns.peel.net
peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.9
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
peel.net SOA (Zone of Authority)
Primary NS: ns1.peel.com
Responsible person: [e-mail]
serial:2001092202
refresh:10800s (3 hours)
retry:3600s (60 minutes)
expire:604800s (7 days)
minimum-ttl:86400s (24 hours)
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns1.peel.com
peel.net NS (Nameserver) ns2.chi.pnap.net
returns.peel.net A (Address) 216.52.138.24
ns1.peel.com A (Address) 216.52.138.3
ns2.chi.pnap.net A (Address) 216.52.129.33

One MX record, and when one tries to connect to it:

----begin telnet capture----
$ telnet returns.peel.net 25
Trying 216.52.138.24...
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused
----end telnet capture----

Other Usenet posters have reported a similar inability to connect to returns.peel.net (and the name of the MX itself is indicative of a rather interesting sense of humour):

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=9njtk0%24aa2% 241%40FreeBSD.csie.NCTU.edu.tw&output=gplain [google.com]

So, the owners and operators of peel.net have cunningly managed, it would appear, to not only convince two of the UK's largest and more respected companies to use their service for what Sainsbury's and Virgin Wines apparently genuinely believed was a true, genuine, opt-in email marketing operation, they have also managed (by technical means) to ensure that their own bandwidth will not be wasted by such trivial communications as "message undeliverable" bounce messages either.

One wonders if an alleged spam operation with such a fascinating mindset might attempt a little social engineering hack, against a news site which exposed their antics so comprehensively. On 24 December, I doubt whether many of PSINet's key UK staff were operating. A telephone call to support, followed by a fax request to "detag our domain as we won't be using it any more" might produce an interesting result, might it not? Especially since one imagines PSINet UK have a handy internal Web front end tool for support staff to use to register/modify/detag domains, and that support staff on 24 December might have had other things on their mind, and when one considers how easy faxes are to fake (which makes it hard to understand why so many UK ISPs insist on them for such requests, rather than an email originating from the customer concerned's netblock, or a PGP signed email from the admin contact of the domain concerned).

--
Anthony Edwards
[e-mail]

I did!

[The Madpostal Worker]

I'm a volunteer firefighter and I ended up pulling a 12 hour shift christmas eve-christmas day. I figured : "Hey, I'm young, unattached why not?", and it wasn't that bad. I higly encourage anyone who has any interest in become a firefighter to look in to it. It's great fun, very rewarding, and a chance to help people. Personally, I think that this year's christmas eve was the best I've had in a while, It was very nice to completely avoid the commercialism that sometimes surounds christmas.

Merry Christmas! Be Safe!

'Most people'

[Anonymous Coward]

>"instead of enjoying what most in the world (especially in America) would consider
'the Holidays'."

*Most* people in the world are Chinese or Indian, and they have a very different viewpoint on what the 'holidays' are...

(See, we can't even talk about it without being parochial... 'holidays' = 'holy days', a term which was created by the same bureaucracy that brought you Christmas, which - and this is verifiable, check your history books - wasn't advocated by any Christian church until about 200 years ago.)

Now if you define 'most people' as 'Christians and Jews' the way alot of the west does, then perhaps most people do indeed think of these days as the holidays.

I for one have had to work every single holiday for over two years now, by virtue of my being the one person on my team who really is indispensible... so management, who has a 'someone must be working on this at all times' rule, has decided that since we need one person in over the holidays, it must be me.

As a result, I pick other holidays and take those days off. This year it will be Chinese New Year, Ganesha Chaturthi, Guy Fawkes Day, the Oregon Country Fair, and all of Burning Man.

Don't let the bastards tell you / sell you what is holy.

-foo freen

Re:And us non-christians...

[Angst Badger]

Ditto here, though I'm a Thelemite rather than a Pagan. Christmas is just another day unless you're part of the one-sixth of the world population that adheres to Christianity. The rest of us have our own holidays, and we often work the "official" holidays to get them off. Fortunately, the major Thelemic holidays are in early April and early October when competition for time off is not especially stiff.

When I was a teenager, I always volunteered for Christmas -- it's the biggest sales day of the year for movie theatres, and one of the biggest in the restaurant business.

I'm just glad I don't have to deal with a holy month like my Muslim colleagues do.