How was your Thanksgiving? For many, it was a time for togetherness, a time for gratitude. Football on the telly, ice-cold beer in hand, plates piled high with coma-inducing grub. It’s a heartwarming American tradition—and it doesn’t even involve gratuitous slaughter anymore!
Except the entire charade is apparently real effin’ boring and we’d rather work.
Six in ten Americans admit to checking work email during Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other holiday breaks, according to a Xobni survey. That’s 60 percent of people blistering their BlackBerry thumbs, cranking out condemnations of Floyd’s hack job on that Excel spreadsheet.
Worse yet, American workers are grateful not for the holidays or aw-shucks togetherness, but rather for the diversion provided by the “amped pinging of synergistic assignment capsules” (or however that jargon goes):
Almost 20 percent of those who received work-related email during their holidays said they were thankful for having gotten the messages, because it was a distraction from the family holiday.
Dudes are particularly guilty of this behavior: 67 percent of working men use email to tune out grandma’s retelling of the day she lost her virginity, compared to just 50 percent of women.
The happy stat (well, the stat that’s the least tinged with cascading notions of “family”) is that 10 percent of survey respondents pity those who do send work-related emails on holidays. So as happy as the distraction may have made you, you had a swinging chance of looking like a sad clown.
We Americans are known for our outstanding work ethic, our Horatio Alger rah-rah-capitalism ethos. But during family holidays, where should the line be drawn?
Still, I hope you had a stress-free Thanksgiving—even if that meant staying in the (virtual) office.