Americans might love freedom, but we sure hate vacations.
A survey last month showed that 43 percent of us do work while we're supposed to be getting tans and drinking mojitos.
Technology is mostly to blame for us checking in at the office now and then. (Now and then being every half-hour.) Turning the cell off seems rude, and we're all addicted to e-mail anyway.
But companies trying to make do with fewer employees have a way of subconsciously guilt-tripping people into believing their work world will fall apart while they're gone. Do you really want to leave Patterson in charge of delivering the final report? Um, yeah, so you might want to reschedule that trip to the Outer Banks.
Even professions where you expect to get a lot of time off don't really deliver. Kids all over the nation get shell-shocked each summer when they see Mrs. Johnson from fifth period waitressing at Bob Evans and the creepy health teacher lifeguarding at the community pool.
What's really sad is that when we finally do go on vacation, we don't know how to have fun.
The coworker of a friend of mine spent two years charting out her family's biennial Disney World trip in 15-minute increments in Excel. Immediately after returning from the little $10,000 vacay -- which she mostly complained about, my sources say -- she began planning the next one. (You know this mom has got to have a copy of Baby's First Spreadsheet saved somewhere.)
It's a far cry from loading in the station wagon and driving across the U.S. of A. to see the Hoover Dam like our parents did. Long gone are the coolers packed with chicken-salad sandwiches. Food poisoning risk, you know. And there's no cell phone reception at the Grand Canyon.
Protestant guilt may be to blame -- that pesky work ethic makes us incapable of even taking a full hour for lunch. But what do we get from being the No. 1 most hard-working country in the world? A few refills of Xanax and carpal tunnel, that's what.
We should take some cues from the holiday-friendly Europeans. In the time the average American takes off all year, a German is just starting to get comfortable in Mallorca or Corfu. And is looking over photos from last month's jaunt to Malta.
And those of us without kids or mortgages could stand to listen to recent college grads, the only adults with any vacation expectations left.
"Hold the phone. I don't get summers off? Forget this, I'm going to grad school."
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