CSotD: Time Out
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Janis may think he's a know-it-all, but I'd like Arlo to take over the world a little more, because I'm still confused every February over which holiday we dropped to make room for MLK. If we all called it "Washington's Birthday," that would solve the problem.
Celebrating both Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays worked well because, with roughly a week between them, schools could agree on a winter break and families could plan a getaway, which was particularly appropriate in the northern states where February begins the "Enough Already" season.
The schools still schedule a break for that period, but parents don't get to fold two holidays into it, which doesn't matter a whole lot because there aren't a lot of American businesses that give a damn about federal holidays anymore anyway, which, paired with stingy holiday policies, makes it hard for families to plan much of anything except to plan the fact that they're going to need to spend money on daycare several times a year.
When I first worked at the paper in Plattsburgh, you got one week (five days) vacation after your first year, and a second week after you had been there seven years. A new publisher lowered that second figure to, IIRC, three years, but, in any case, it was tough living 25 miles not just from Canada but from French Canada, where they not only have the vacation and holiday policies of a civilized nation, but lump in a variety of Catholic holy days, provincial observances and Les Vacances.
Les Vacances de la construction is, as that page explains, when about 120,000 construction workers get two weeks off. As explained there, a lot of families not in the industry also plan time off then, but a secondary factor is that there are a lot of businesses tied to construction that might as well close up shop as well, so I'm not sure where the 120,000 figure comes in.
I do know that there was a state beach between my house and the office, and for two weeks I'd have to drive past crowds of vacationing Quebecois on my lunch break.
Anyway, when we decided to honor Martin Luther King with a holiday where only teachers, bank employees and postal workers would get the day off anyway, the choice of which president to de-holidayize was pretty obvious, because the people who objected to honoring MLK were already pissed that we honored Lincoln.
And we certainly couldn't simply add a holiday to the calendar because then we wouldn't be competitive with the rest of the world.
(In fairness, when I first moved to Plattsburgh in 1987, Quebec still had laws that required most stores to be closed on Sunday, but they changed that because it made more sense to spread the same amount of retail spending over seven days of labor and utility costs than over six. So, you see, wise US microeconomic policy can have an impact in other countries!)
I think Dustin's father may be the only person in America who still has a secretary, while everyone else has assistants, sometimes "executive assistants" and sometimes "administrative assistants."
I had five plain-old "assistants" at the second paper where I did educational programs.
Two of them — one of whom was a guy, BTW — I was considering firing when they each quit, which is how the world should always run.
But the other three were crackerjacks and, like Dustin's father's secretary, were generally several steps ahead of me, and not simply in the "Don't forget you've got a lunch" sense, though that, too.
But, for instance, one of them was running a packet of materials to a teacher in the middle of the mountains where there was no cell service, and, when she wasn't back in two, then three, then four hours, I was really worried that she'd gone into a ditch out there.
But she came cheerfully back to the office around four o'clock and explained that she'd handed off the material and then got talking to him and wound up teaching a full day of media literacy lessons to his students.
I used to bring them coffee and then stay the hell out of their ways.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Obviously, Rover is trying to tell Red about the terrorist attack in Sweden.
By contrast, Kuehn is trying to warn us that we have a president who ignores his intelligence briefings and gets his information by sitting around in his bathrobe watching TV.
He's kidding, of course, because Sean Spicer has already assured us that the president has no bathrobe. Despite ample evidence that he does.
The big difference being that dogs aren't expected to wear anything more than a collar in the first place.
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