Back to the Grindstone

Well, 2 days back at work and I'm already tired of working. That's one day better than last year. The 3 weeks semester break seems to have flown by. I probably should have taken an extra week, but it's difficult to know at the time. We're not really "stay at home" holiday people so it would have been an extra week of finding chores to do. Still, at least it would have been chores at home and not chores in the office. The good part about taking holidays is that I came back to a nice clean office. I clean my room twice a year, once before I go on holiday, and once before Christmas. It was nice to actually see some desk again. I have this system where everything is "over there somewhere". Usually it works pretty well. I now how to remember where I put everything after my summer spring clean.

I have 5 weeks vacation every year, which is about the nom in Sweden. Some lucky bastards (such as my dearly beloved) have 6 weeks. Anyway, back in New Zealand I had only 3 weeks annual vacation. Which was standard. I used to try and keep a couple of days up my sleeve and only took 2 weeks at one time. So taking 3 weeks with some left over now is a bit of a luxury. I'm allowed to save one week of my holidays every year which I've done in case I should decide to take a holiday back in NZ. You have to factor in the best part of a week for travel and stop overs along the way. I've got a month saved up now which means that I could take a long holiday and still have my normal summer holidays. Pretty cunning, I thought. I then save the 5th week to use at Christmas or for a long weekend if we decide to pop away somewhere. I was rather lucky back in NZ where my union had reached an agreement to have paid holidays between Christmas and New Year. If Christmas or New Year fell on a weekend then those public holiday days off were moved to the nearest working days. Sweden doesn't do that which surprises me as they seem to grab any chance going to score a public holiday. So anyway, with my union agreement I got the 3 working days off between Christmas and New Year on full pay which worked out to a week off work. Being backwards in seasons, Christmas was in the summer time, so that's when everyone took their annual holidays.

After the honeymoon period of yesterday I've realised that autumn is going to be pretty full on. Good in some ways, but I'm already stressing over it. We have a new staff member starting in a couple of weeks who I am hoping to steal to help me on my project. He's Australian so I'm not sure how much use he'll be. He seems pretty competant, but he's still Australian. Before I went on holiday I cleaned out his new room. Just so it would look a little less like the former store room that it is. As messy as I am, I'm one of the tidiest on my team. A pretty depressing state of affairs. Anyway, now it almost looks like someone could work in the new office. Hopefully the rest of the system is in place for him. My team boss didn't even know that this guy had been hired, we had to tell him. Tells you something about the organisation, so I'm not holding out for miracles.

The somewhat intimidating emails which I had sent out prior to going on holiday have all been answered with positive results. "I'll be back on the 6th of August and if I don't have the information I asked for 3 weeks ago then I won't be able to deliver the project on time" seems to have done the trick. One thing I've noticed about Swedes (in my profession at least) is that they aren't terribly good at thinking ahead. They turn out good work, but it always seems to come down to the last minute and unecessary stress levels. Time management and forward planning isn't a strength. As a former workmate of mine once described someone: "Works well when cornered like a rat". Maybe they should incorporate that onto the Swedish Coat of Arms.