My Holiday Detection System is Permanently Broken
March 20th, 2008, 8 Comments »
I never know when there are holidays anymore. I chalk this up to three factors:
- Living abroad, while not working in the local economy.
- Having clients in Canada, the U.S., Ireland and the U.K.
- Being self-employed, with mostly self-employed friends.
This is not a “woe is me, I don’t get paid holidays” post. I work really hard some weeks, not so hard other weeks and take holidays when I want. I like it this way.
I just learned that tomorrow and Monday are statutory holidays, thanks to Easter. This is a ‘work really hard’ week, so I won’t be taking them off. Still, I’m struck by my recent ignorance of local holidays. When you live in country a and work for companies in countries, b, c, d and e, it gets tricky. I had to be aware of bank holidays in Malta, because everything (yes, everything) closes.
I first observed this when I worked at a software company in Ireland. We had offices and customers in the U.S., U.K. and Europe, plus a few random employees around the globe. We got to talking about which countries had the most holidays, and which had the least. I seem to recall that Italy was very well fixed, and the U.K. was screwing the proverbial bank holiday pooch. I did some Googling, but couldn’t find anything remotely authoritative that covered a bunch of countries.
Speaking of Google, I’m going to go find some public-facing Google calendars that show the holidays for all the aforementioned countries. That way I can keep track of who’s working when.