The great vacation dilemma

My last vacation almost killed me.

Nothing dramatic happened; I didn’t go skydiving with a bum parachute, or get attacked by zebras on an African safari, or run with scissors through downtown Lewiston. I did, however, experience more than two consecutive days off, and in many lines of work, that’s akin to a rapidly ascending deep-sea diver getting the bends: You get used to a certain level of pressure, and when it’s released, your body doesn’t know how to handle it.

In the modern civilized era, vacations have become as important to human survival as water and back massages. Imagine a world without them – vacations, not back massages. Imagine going to your job on Monday, plowing through your work week, feeling euphoric as punch-out time on Friday draws near, and squeezing in all your living, your memories, your trips to Cancun, in the meager two days usually reserved for laziness and football. You’d spend a lot of your time hyperventilating, and Aunt Maude would never get to see her grandkids.

It’s a pretty common complaint among Americans that vacation time is not plentiful enough. That’s not a complaint you hear in most other civilized countries.

In France, workers are guaranteed 37 days off per year. That’s a guarantee because it’s the law. Give an employee a scant 36 days and you are beaten about the face with baguettes and wheels of bitter cheese.

In Germany, you get 35 days. In Brazil, 34. Even our neighbors to the north, those proud Canadians, get 26 days, which they need, because they commute to work in temperatures colder than the vacuum of space. That’s gotta take it out of you.

We Americans? We average 13 days.

Thirteen days to travel out to Oak Ridge, Tenn., to take a tour of their X-10 nuclear reactor. Thirteen days to check out the Superman Museum in Metropolis, Ill. Want to see the world’s largest ball of twine in Branson, Mo.? Better equip your car with some turbo and hope you don’t get caught.

In all fairness to American companies (and the lawmakers who regulate them), we’re not capped at 13 days. There are opportunities to earn more, although the requirements for doing so are often pretty steep – like having to work fifteen years straight without a sick day while constantly petting the boss’ cat. That might earn you an extra half-day and a gift cetificate to a pizza joint cited for code violations.

But imagine the feeling of starting a new job and knowing you won’t have to go through years of initiation to bank the necessary time to travel to Selkirk, Manitoba – home of a giant statue of Chuck the Channel Cat.

Now I don’t know about you, but the longer I go without a day off – and especially some extended time, even a long weekend – the more of a struggle it is to perform a job up to my own standards. A good analogy is physical exercise: When burning off cheesecake on a treadmill, you’re always running faster at the beginning of the workout than at the end. That’s because your workout muscles are rested and ready to roll. You attack the treadmill like Garfield attacks Odie.

Likewise, rested work muscles let a person attack their job harder, faster, and free of bizarre treadmill analogies. It can be argued that the work done fresh off a vacation is more efficient, and performed with a greater attention to detail.

And it doesn’t really matter what line of work you’re in. You could be completely in love with your job and still benefit from some prolonged hammock time. If your job is to lie on a bed of marshmallows and fig leaves and let fashion models rub your feet and fan you with palm fronds, you could still use a vacation – although at that point it might be hard to find a leisure activity that provides an adequate counterpoint. Maybe a trip to South Dakota to see the Mitchell Corn Palace.

Point being, Americans are in desperate need of more vacation time. So lawmakers, take note. Just look at some examples from around the world – Italy, for example, which tops the time-off list with a whopping 42 vacation days. Forty-two days! And have you ever seen an angry Italian?

Wait. Don’t answer that.