I don't think that's the case at all. One reason our firm prohibits people from taking vacations south of the equator is that, when they return, they expect to be jet lagged on company time. A long holiday, such as a week or ten days, just means that the holiday is not much disrupted by the jet lag.

I'm actually chuckling a little about there even being a place of employment that can have a list of approved locations for employees' holidays. Is this for real?

Anyway, I accept, again, that our traveller will have jet-lag when he returns from his holiday, but the intelligent person lands a day or so before he starts work so he is more in synch with the new time-zone.

My niece lived in Auckland until earlier this year. We had an open invitation and looked into taking a trip down there. It's not something I would consider unless I was wealthy enough to fly business and had lots and lots of time on my hands.

Yes. We also have an astonishing list of leisure pursuits that are grounds for dismissal, including but not limited to, skiing, riding in a private aircraft, skateboarding, driving offroad, horseback riding, snowmobiling, ice fishing, diving, deep sea fishing... It goes on and on but basically anything entailing an element of physical risk. It seems to me that everytime I find a new fun thing to do I get a memo from the legal department saying that it's been added to the list. We also don't allow people to take vacations in locations where they would not be reachable by telephone.

We went to Adelaide on frequent flyer points.

Me:

Toronto-Philadelphia-Atlanta-LA

OH:

GJ-Denver-Salt Lake-LA

Both

LA-Seoul-Sydney-Adelaide

all of it in the back row of the plane. It's not something people can do for a vacation, take two days off, and be fit for work again.

I can partly understand your reluctance, but to my mind it seems like wasted opportunity. Firstly, it's only about 8500 miles, and you could easily get a stop-off in Hawaii for a couple of days either end of your holiday to soak some jet-lag up. What a great holiday - and no accommodation costs presumably!

Not sure I agree with you about the business class thing either. If you can sit economy for 8 hours straight, you can sit in economy for two separate shifts of 8 hours straight, surely.

There's a book in here somewhere, dbd. Get scribbling. Driving off-road??? So you get fired if you're caught taking your car over a field to a lake, etc.? This is a US company, I hope? Surely no decent colony of HM would impose such draconian rules.

Four days is more than a third of the typical annual holiday allowance here. That's a lot of time to use for nothing in particular.

It's not two shifts of eight hours. Even if you buy a premium ticket it's something like six hours to the west coast, eight to a stopping point (Hawaii, Seoul, Taipai, wherever), twelve to Sydney, more to Auckland. Suppose five hours hanging around at each stop and even a cheap charter to London looks like luxury by comparison.

That's right. YOW-YYZ-LAX-AKL is close to 30 hours, including up to 10 hours hanging around in airports.

It's a Canadian company. The clients used to be in the US but they're mostly in India now. The Indian thing is more of a pain in the arse than the prohibited passtimes; yesterday, for example, a client called in broken English demanding that we all be working this weekend and on through next week. That's a bother because Tuesday is a holiday here, that's something that a US based client would have recognized and handled better - we'd still be working but we wouldn't be insulted.

Hey, I don't make the rules.


Again, this only counts for East Coast people. Those already in Vancouver or LA have a head start. But Quebec is only 4500 miles from Hawaii, 14 hours seems a long flight for so short a distance.

How can it be more to Auckland than Sydney when Auckland is 700 miles close to Hawaii than Sydney? Forgive me if none of these figures add up; I am pretty tired and wanna go home and no be sitting at a keyboard.

But Canada has Boxing Day as a holiday too though, doesn't it?

I'm not sure. We only take the ones that coincide between the US and Canada, that's usually Christmas Day and President's Day.

Canada has Boxing Day and I think about 10 Floating Free Days, Summer there is one long weekend each month.

Maternity Leave is a Year, paid.

I'm just quoting the numbers I got off Expedia.

YOW-YYZ 1 hour
2 hour wait
YYZ-LAX 5 hours 15 minutes
7 hour wait
LAX-AKL 12 hours 45 minutes

If I lived on the west coast, the trip would be very do-able. That last leg is my preffered flight length. What comes before that is the nasty bit. I think it would be much worse coming back.