Vacations are trouble. Sure, you tell yourself you deserve a rest, but do you really rest? As far as I can tell, vacations are not a change of scenery, they are just a change of stress. The stress of battling traffic, the stress of getting lost, the stress of dealing with everyone in the car, and the stress of worrying about the problems that will beset you when you get back to the office.

I think that there has to be a rule that when you go on vacation, you can't bring your family. Also, no emergencies are allowed at the office while you are away. No cell phones either.

 

I remember many, many years ago when I worked at a large law firm. One partner, a securities lawyer, went on photo safari to Africa. Away from it all – no phones or telegraphs. But then, an emergency came up with a pending securities offering. The other partners managed to track him down and communicate with him via one fax machine in a hut somewhere that was somehow connected to a satellite uplink. He spent several days in that hut working on a multi-million dollar offering and ended up with some nice photos of a fax machine. And this was in the days before the internet. Now, if my client is in Egypt, he can hook into a wifi connection and send me documents instantly halfway around the world.

Vacations can get you into trouble. Banks now require all employees to go on vacation, because they discovered that embezzlers never go on vacation – embezzlers don't want anyone else touching the books to discover what they did. When federal and state budgets get tight, they make people go on vacation – they call it a furlough. But it's a way to discover what jobs they can get rid of without affecting performance. If you are on vacation, and things go so well they don't miss you, maybe they don't need you to come back.

Being on vacation at the wrong time can also hurt. Right now in Russia, with the wildfire crisis ongoing, about 700 people a day dying, and the chance that wildfires could blow radioactive smoke from Chernobyl to Moscow, the mayor of Moscow, along with many local leaders, is on vacation. He moved his beehives away from the smog, but not the people, and still has not declared a state of emergency. Why should he? He's on vacation. The head of Moscow's forestry department was also on vacation. He has since been fired – by the vacationing mayor – for being on vacation.

So, phooey on vacations. I've just been on one, and now that I'm back, I need a vacation from my vacation.

Marvin Wolf is a Newark consumer and bankruptcy law attorney who is a regular contributor to LocalTalk. This article provides legal information and individual smart-ass opinion, but not legal advice. Mr. Wolf can be contacted through his office at (973) 735-2740 or his website www.wolfprotect.com.