Happy Holidays!

Life is hard!

There are 365days in a year and only 102 of them are weekends, meaning that a shocking total of 263 days are working days! With the average employee only getting about 20 leave days per year (compared to the average German diplomat who gets twice as many), 243 days of the year are potentially working days. Ouch!

Fortunately, there are normally also about ten public holidays – conventional ones like Christmas and Easter and more extravagant ones like Women’s Day, Youth Day and Heritage Day (whatever they may stand for, they are free and that is all that matters!)

But the trouble with some public holidays is that they may fall on a weekend and thus get lost in time and space, leaving hard-working and chronically-asleep employees alike with one more day on which to drag themselves out of bed, schlep themselves to the office and pretend to be working while playing Solitaire or researching their next holiday.

Fortunately, I live in a country in which politicians are desperate to be popular and unions powerful. So when the Federation of Unions of South Africa FEDUSA complaint that the 25th of December, which would fall on a Sunday, would get lost as a public holiday, Government was surprisingly quick to respond: Only a couple of days after the initial complaint (with normal Government turnaround times averaging about two years...), South Africa’ Deputy President announced that there would be an additional public holiday this year on the 27th of December to compensate for the lost day.

Even though it made me wish that Government was that fast and efficient in responding to all issues, I am certainly not going to complain – after all, it means that I can spend one more day travelling the world next year rather than staring at computer screens and attending meetings.

Happy days - happy holidays!