Section 9.2. Vacation Time

9.2. Vacation Time

Let me tell you a little secret about vacation time.

Companies don't give you time off because they want to be nice to you. They aren't doing it to be charitable.

They're doing it because you're difficult to work with when you are stressed. Let me say that a little more forcefully: when you postpone taking time off, you become a pain in the ass to everyone in the office, and we don't like working with you. You're irritable, difficult, and disagreeable. SO TAKE TIME OFF, DAMN IT!

Sorry for yelling, but it's for your own good.

A successful vacation takes your mind off work enough so that it can relax. It may take several days to forget about work enough so that you are in full relaxation mode. Only then can your body repair itself. I need at least three days to get to relaxation mode, and then six or more days of relaxation to really feel refreshed. Add a couple travel days and a day to get back into the swing of things, and we're talking 12 to 14 days for a really successful vacation. You deserve at least as much.

Let's look at some common vacation mistakes that system administrators make:

• Using an occasional vacation day to run errands, do laundry, etc. That's not a vacation. That's using vacation time, but it doesn't meet the goal of relaxing. Maybe you can use comp time for errands or come into work early and take an hour or two off during the day to run errands.

• Taking a long weekend. That's sort of like a vacation, but it skips the multiday process of getting to relaxation mode. Plus, when I try this, I end up with a backlog of weekend chores. That creates even more stress. A series of long weekends doesn't count either.

• Bringing your laptop and checking email every few hours while on vacation. If you check email during your vacation, you never really relax. Every time you check your email you put your brain back in work mode and you need another three days to return to relax mode. Most hotels provide Internet access for a small charge. I want a hotel that, for a small charge, promises that I will be completely prevented from getting anywhere near any kind of Internet access.

Not checking email is difficult. Very difficult. When I take a real vacation I have to coordinate to have my VPN access shut off, or I will not be able to prevent myself from reading email. It's a sickness.

The first few days of a vacation I tend to have work on my mind. I find that if I'm having trouble letting go, it can be useful to write down what's on my mind so that it will be there when I return to work. Otherwise, I'll try to keep the idea in my brain, and that just prevents me from letting go.

I've heard system administrators brag about not taking vacation. "This company can't survive without me! I'm proud that I haven't had a vacation in years." I cringe when I hear this. As a manager, I fear an SA may develop a martyr complex. A person with a martyr complex assumes that because she is paying such a great price to keep the company running, everyone owes her something. She becomes impossible to work with. I find that a person in this situation eventually feels overwhelmed, cornered, and unable to escape. The person who feels this way typically leaves the company soon, often unexpectedly, and I lose a technically talented person who is difficult to replace.

I feel less cornered when I can leave a job easily and without guilt. Keeping good documentation helps that. Chapter 12 explains how to make it easier to document processes.

A long vacation has another business benefitit helps determine where your coverage and/or documentation is lacking. Good system administrators assume that they may be hit by a truck tomorrow and the company should be able to continue without them. Taking a long vacation is one way to test that theory without suffering bodily harm.

Here's my advice about taking a vacation:

• Two weeks before you leave, figure out what coverage is needed and spend time training the person who is covering for you.

• The week before you leave, make sure that the person can do those tasks without asking questions.

• The day before you leave, do not do anything as root or Administrator. You don't want to make any changes that can't be fixed. If the temptation is great, distract yourself: spend the day writing documentation.

• When you return, take time to see where the coverage gaps occurred. It is common to find that something stopped working and that your company lived without it until you returned. What was it that broke? What could have been documented?

"But how could I ever train someone to know everything that I know?" You don't have to. He only has to know enough so that your company can survive a week or two. For example, maybe one of your jobs is to generate a certain set of reports each week. The person who covers for you doesn't have to know how to create new report templates, just how to run the ones that exist. If a new report template is needed, it can wait until you get back. If it is a real emergency, people can print out a few reports and cut and paste the bits of paper into the format they need. (In reality, the person who needs the report will understand because she takes vacations, too.)

Here's another example: maybe you are in charge of backups. The person covering for you needs to know how to do any daily tape changes and how to restore a deleted file or directory. He doen't need to know how to add a new disk volume to the schedule or how to readjust the schedule. It is unlikely that a new disk will be added to the system while you are away, and if some manager has a brilliant new backup schedule she'd like to see implemented, waiting another week should be fine. Of course, if a catastrophic failure happened and RAID or other failover systems weren't able to save the data, you might have to come back from vacation early, but how often does that happen? (And if it would result in losing millions of dollars per day, why is only one person trained in your disaster-recovery process? But I digress....)

When you have someone trained to cover for you, it's important to make sure that you coordinate vacations so that you both aren't out at the same time. This is a normal business practice. In fact, at most companies I know, the CEO coordinates time off with the CFO, and the VP of engineering coordinates with a direct report. We are at least as important and should do the same.