(Not) Calling In
One side benefit of loving my job is that I never ever call in sick. Until I started working in IS, calling in sick was just a regular part of my life. I wasn’t usually sick (or at least not sick enough to really warrant not going to work), I was mostly just calling in bored-to-death. My supervisors have always loved me because I’m smart and can be counted on to handle any project that comes my way, but if they had to pick an area where my performance is less than ideal, it would definitely be my sick days. I never call in enough to warrant any kind of talking to, but I push the boundaries as far as I possibly can. It’s just what I do, it’s what I’ve always done. I don’t like it, it makes me feel terribly irresponsible, but when faced with a looming day of boredom in my job, sometimes I just cannot resist.
But once I started working in IS, that all changed. Now I never dread coming in to work. Don’t get me wrong, I like my time off, but I also like coming in to work every day, I look forward to my work and I happily think about it when I’m not working (god that is still so weird to write). While it’s great to like my job and to really enjoy the work I do, one additional benefit is that I have all this time off accrued!
One nice benefit to working at my nonprofit is that we get 34 days off per year (and more after the first two years). We don’t get vacation time or sick time or holidays, we just get this lump of days that we can take when we want. Don’t want to take Presidents Day off? Come in to work and save a day for another time. Want to take a week off in spring and another in summer and another in fall and another in winter and still have three and a half weeks of time off to use at other times? Great!
It’s a nice system but it’s never worked out spectacularly for me because I piss away all my days on sick bored-to-death days and never get to take days off that I want to take off. Until now, of course. Now I have all this time off and I’m plotting the greedy ways I can use the days for pre-planned fun. Last week I took a day off so that my boys and I could have an adventure in our city. This week I’m taking a day off to try to get some of my non-work shit together. In the near future I’m planning to take a day off to visit a nearby city and check out special exhibit at their art museum and I’m dreaming of the far future where I take an entire month off and my boys and I go down to Mexico and help build a cob house while simultaneously learning Spanish.
It’s nice to love one’s job. Super nice. Super duper nice, even. I was reading through draft posts that I never got around to finishing and it’s almost embarrassing the number of posts I’ve started writing about how much I love my job and how I never call in sick anymore even though that’s pretty much unheard of for me. But I keep writing about it because it’s just so surprising. As I said, calling in sick is what I do. I’ve always done it. As often as I can get away with. And now I don’t do it at all, ever. In almost a year of work. It’s just so shocking.