Beaches and BBQs vs. Blackberrys: Holiday weekends of the IT set
For all of the talk these days about this about the pie-in-the-sky hope that all of the wage-earners in this land can achieve some semblance of work-life balance, you hear a lot less about those jobs for which the notion of guaranteed days, evenings or holiday weekends off are, quite honestly, a joke.
"Umm... weekend? What's a weekend?" a New York IT and services consultant told me today.
He wasn't alone in admitting that as the rest of the country are escaping their offices for a leisurely weekend, he could end up back there at the beep of a Blackberry.
"I won't be 'on-the-clock' but who knows what'll happen this weekend since I'm on call. I've got a history of jinxed on-call weekends, so my hopes are not high," said a Houston-based systems analyst.
Though most IT professionals understand that it is the nature of the enterprise technology beast that they are present to toil over switchboards and software upgrades when the rest of an organization's employees are absent, their work undisrupted, it doesn't make them any less likely to cross their fingers and hope their number doesn't come up in the queue.
"I myself will be on call, but I am third in the list so hopefully--knock on wood--nothing goes wrong," a Microsoft engineer in Tampa told me.
In fact, the difference between manning the grill between rounds of Marco-Polo in the pool with the kids can come down to something as little as what system takes a nosedive.
"... Of course, if it is an Exchange problem, I get bumped right to the top of the list," the Tampa engineer explained.
Self-employed consultants often say that there is no such thing as a day off when you're a one man show.
"I am not only a tech, but a business owners, and in some ways this means that no, the 'shop' per se is never actually fully closed," said the New York IT and services consultant.
Furthermore, if managing project teams overseas where July 4th is most certainly not a holiday, it's unlikely to be a quiet day off.
This is not to say that all holiday weekends are filled with dread if you work in IT.
"If you like computers, it doesn't matter much if you're stuck working on them over the weekend," a Sacramento-based software CEO weighed in.
In fact, many even choose to work on personal or business technology projects on the weekend, in part to stay ahead of the game but also because they're so passionate about it.
"It's not required for my job, but I'll be prepping over the weekend for the MCTS: SQL Server 2005 exam," Jerry Hammond, an operations manager at a computer learning center in Las Vegas told me. "I have some time to do this during my regular work week, but this is once again quickly becoming a competitive market."