This weekend is the Easter holiday weekend around the world and with today being Good Friday, it's a vacation day for me.

The ski slopes are closing this weekend and if the weather is good, I'll be heading up for one last day of sliding down Copper mountain today. Winter is when I tend to take a lot of vacation and this weekend is the end of that season for me.

Hopefully everyone is having a quiet day if you are at work, with nothing broken and no deployments scheduled over the holiday. I know that holidays are often the best time for deployments to occur for the business as there are less people working on the systems. When I worked as a production DBA, especially in places where the systems were usually in use 24 hours a day by other employees, holidays were the only time we could schedule extended outages.

As much as that can be frustrating to IT people that want to get a break on the holidays, I think that the IT business, like some other businesses, require you to trade some holiday work for time off at other parts of the year. My previous careers in the restaurant and hospitality business had me working many holidays, and I know that many people in retail positions also end up working holidays like Easter.

My advice to find a balance in your life is to negotiate a rotation for IT covereage on holidays and perhaps even ask for two days off if you have to work this one holiday. There are lots of progressive companies that do recognize a hardship for holiday work, but plenty of others that don't have an IT policy since most workers take the holiday off. People that work on an hourly basis usually get twice their rate for holiday work, why not salaried IT workers?

Enjoy the weekend and enjoy the blooper reel today.

Steve Jones

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