So a friend of mine, Colleen, forwarded me this article today talking about ethics and vacation.  It was very interesting to note that most people fall into one of the four categories:

A) I receive 15 days of paid vacation each year, and I take them—guilt-free.

B) I receive 15 days of paid vacation each year, but I feel guilty if I take any of them.

C) I haven’t had a vacation in years; I’m loyal to my company or business and am proud of this fact.

D) I work for myself and don’t take vacations; if I don’t work, I don’t make money.

I believe I'm more of the "B" type and that's not because I want attention.  I usually get this feeling that I shouldn't take vacation, or even on some days when I plan on it, I'll cancel my vacation date to work.  Is it so important to cancel?  Well, yes and no?  This whole week I planned a while ago to take off along with next, however, with all the stuff going on at the Emergent Media Center (my favorite place of work), I felt it was necessary to take it off.  Mostly because I felt I would be strongly needed and that I'd probably upset my employer if I wasn't there if working when they needed me.  Because of this, I will be losing vacation since it goes away.

I feel sometimes it's not very easy to take a vacation day or two... In fact, I feel it's selfish (for myself) to do so.  I guess that's part of why I feel guilty about it.  Believe me; I really feel the need to take a vacation a lot of times.  In fact, I'd prefer to just simply stay home and do stuff around the house.  I've been feeling that a lot of my time lately has been devoted to projects at home or someone else's need (adult/grown-up stuff) like doing taxes or moving.  This is stuff that's not really fun, but I guess it's necessary.  But staycation in this case makes me feel a little better about being lazy since I don't really have an itinerary to worry about just as if we decided to go to Disney world.  If Corinn and I did that (which would be awesome, I've never been to either parks) and I just came off of a ridiculous work week load, I'd feel exhausted and guilty that all I wanted to do was sleep or relax rather than needing to try every ride, go to the beach, see stuff... basically I don't like rigid schedules on vacation.  Don't get me wrong, getting to do things is totally cool and part of the human perpetuated interest.  However, if they are regimented, then they're not much more fun than being at the office (and believe me, the students I work with are a blast!).

So another reason why I don't take a vacation or feel bad about vocalizing it has to do with habits created by my bosses.  Sometimes you see them taking time off and then saying "I'll be doing work from home," or "I'm canceling and going back into work/will be available." This makes me feel bad when I kind of want to be selfish and say, "I'm keeping to my time off." or what inevitably happens is that I don't take the time off.

I don't know... I guess it's just a frustrating place to be in... Especially when I come home and feel like I've done nothing because I'm doing work pretty much until 6-8pm in the evening.  Oh well, it'd be interesting to see if people who will post comments to this blog regarding the 4 choices share in the discussion.  I feel in general that I do work a lot, but it's because I really enjoy the cause that the college goes for which makes me feel a little bit better when I work late hours.... That somehow what I'm doing is worth it to someone else or that it is a noble effort to work for the college.

I'm now fading in and out of sleep... I guess I should go, but I still have so much to talk about!  Eeek!