Ladies of Hive Community Contest #268: Have you ever had to work on holidays?

The answer is yes, the same answer that many other people will give, unfortunately this is the work reality here: holidays do not exist... with wild liberalizations every company can do whatever it wants and stay open whenever it wants and I am not talking about emergency work like police or doctors, but also nonsense like supermarkets, cinemas or restaurants, not urgent but now always open at the expense of time with family or for oneself.

I work in a place where holidays are just a red number on the calendar and nothing more. In practice they do not exist, apart from Christmas and Easter, the only 2 days in the whole year when the company is actually closed. During the other holidays it does not really close: people work in shifts, someone always has to cover so you know that sooner or later it is your turn to be there. I care a lot about Christmas and the Christmas period and there is one Christmas that has really stuck with me.

The one in which I did not have even a single day off. Nothing. Zero. An electronic invoicing project was supposed to start on January first, presented as something super urgent, fundamental, the kind of thing for which “we must be ready, all eyes are on us”. Result: a request from management that we all be present in the office during the holidays except only on Christmas Day, ready to intervene in case of problems, too bad that everything was starting on January first so at least a week of vacation could have been taken. It was also said that the work still had to be finished and that all the workforce was needed but none of that was true, on the contrary, everything was already ready beforehand.

The tests were working, the systems were in place, there was nothing to fix or complete and this was also said and shown to management and yet there was no way around it, we had to stay there. Sitting at the desk, staring at the screen doing nothing, drinking awful coffee from the vending machine, exchanging a few words just to pass the time. Needless to say, the people who had demanded our presence were on vacation, in fact there was never anyone around, empty offices, empty corridors, only us poor wretches present.

Outside there was the Christmas atmosphere, empty streets, people on vacation. Instead we were there more for presence than for real work, because it “kind of looked good” to show that someone was there, while the days went by and we were all gloomy and pissed off. In the end January first arrived, the project started without problems, as was predictable, and a single person on duty would have been more than sufficient as always.

I had the feeling that I had thrown away days that will not come back, holidays and happy moments with family, where we could have gone to the mountains, gone for walks, eaten together. Being there doing nothing, when I could simply have been elsewhere, living Christmas like everyone else, left a huge anger in all of us for several weeks afterward.