If Your Employer Gave You a Year Off....

[mtnbkr]

Eh, some redundancy is a good thing.  Accidents and illness happen, after all, and if your business can't function without a single individual, you could be setting it up to fail.

QFT.  I've been that one IT guy that couldn't be sick, couldn't take time off, etc.  It ground me down and destroyed my health (at the time).  Now I'm part of a team where we all share the work.  We can tolerate a significant portion of us being absent for short period without the wheels falling off.  That's due to having enough warm bodies and sharing the work so no one person is critical to a given process.  That's by design too.  Not only does it make our group more resilient in a business continuity sense, it also increases security since nobody can "hide" what they're doing from everyone else.

Chris

[MikeB]

IT guy?  I actually took a three week block of time last year, my coworkers thought the sky was falling.

Yep, even my days off aren't days off. I have a day off today, after I go deliver a laptop to an employee that can only be there today, doesn't normally work in the office. And after I make sure some guy in India can connect to a particular server, because the world will end if it isn't done by today. Of course no one thought to talk to IT before deciding to hire all the people in India who should just be able to connect, because they have good internet connections there. 

[erictank]

Eh, some redundancy is a good thing.  Accidents and illness happen, after all, and if your business can't function without a single individual, you could be setting it up to fail.

You said it.  My current job operates at "minimum manning" day in and day out.  Sick time is... problematic, although there are enough overtime hogs that getting vacation scheduled isn't more than a moderate hassle (shouldn't even be THAT bad, but...).  Wonderful thing is, though, we've got one guy retiring in 2 weeks, and another going in 2 months, out of 12 guys on 4 crews.  They aren't even LOOKING for replacements yet - it literally took them YEARS to hire replacements (including me) when the last round of departures happened.  Yeah, it'll make it easier (for a while) to make payments on the new house my wife and I are now looking for, but...   

[Regolith]

QFT.  I've been that one IT guy that couldn't be sick, couldn't take time off, etc.  It ground me down and destroyed my health (at the time). 
Chris

Yeah, I'm kind of in that position as well.  I work for a student newspaper, and I'm the only one who knows how to use the software well enough to do the layout and send it off to the printer to be published.  If I happen to get in an accident or become ill enough to be unable to work, the newspaper won't get published, and our advertisers probably wouldn't be very happy.

If it weren't for the fact we only publish four times a term, I'd have burned out a long time ago (not to mention the havoc it would have wreaked on my school work).

[charby]

If my employer gave me a year off at 1/3 my salary and I could live on a 1/3 then I'd probably go guide upland bird hunters all fall in South Dakota for money.

[T.O.M.]

You know, I must have done something wrong...I went to law school.  Graduated and passed the bar first try.  Did my time at the prosecutor's office gaining experience for relatively low pay.  Now, I'm on the bench.  And I still don't make $80K a year!

Oh yeah, that's right.  I turned down the big firm jobs to have a life.  I forgot.   

[RocketMan]

Regolith, what is the school paper going to do when you graduate, or decide to give it a rest?  Any planning being done for that?

[Regolith]

Regolith, what is the school paper going to do when you graduate, or decide to give it a rest?  Any planning being done for that?

I'm not sure.  Right now there is someone that is "interested" in the job and is supposed to be in the newsroom during publishing weeks so I can train him, but he didn't appear to be very interested when he showed up last week.  We still haven't gotten a firm commitment out of him.

The biggest problem is that we're such a small school, it's hard to find anyone who is interested in the job.  Hell, the only reason I took the job was because the guy who had it before I did is a good friend, and he wheedled me into taking it, because he couldn't find anyone else to.*  Our photo editor left last term (he was a Vietnamese exchange student who decided to go back home), and we had to hire someone with basically zero experience because she's the only one who applied (someone else I'm probably going to have to train...).  Another problem is that we're still using Quark, and only one professor teaches that program (all the others use Illustrator), so our pool of potential applicants is pretty small.  We also have a tiny staff, with one layout editor/production manager(me), one photo editor, and four story editors, so I can't  promote some section layout editor, because we don't have any.  We can't even afford to pay our writers (which makes it an SOB to get them to get their stories in on time).

I may be coming back for another term next year in order to finish off my senior project, as it doesn't look like it's going to get done this term, but I'm not sure I'm going to keep the job past this term.  However, even if I did keep the job, that only extends the deadline for finding another person to take my spot for another term.  So right now its all very much up in the air.

*He didn't have the wheedle very hard, though, as I did need a job at the time...

[KD5NRH]

... at 1/3 of your pay, would you take it?

Depends on the year.  A third of my pay in the last couple decades of the 1700s would probably be manageable, and I could use the time to tutor the Founding Fathers on how to write a Constitution more forcefully.