It's the year of the rat.

I work mostly with Asian markets. As a result, over the past two years I have learned a little about Asian countries. I can write one, two and three in Chinese. I know the proper title of addressing someone in Indonesia (Ibu- or Pak-), Malaysia (Puan- or Tuan-), Thailand (Khun-), and Japan (-san). I always know what time it is in Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan and Thailand. I always know when Chinese New Year is coming and which year we are currently in.

I also know that every one of my markets has more holidays than we do. We get regularly only a few holidays a year: New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, July 4th, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Now I know that we also get 2+ weeks of paid vacation, but I’m telling you, I know that everyone else is racking up more than we are.

Most of these countries celebrate Chinese New Year. This year it happened to fall on Thursday. I have consultants with between 2 and six days off. No one gets less than two. If holidays happen to fall on Saturday, they celebrate them on Monday and people take of Friday just for good measure.

This goes for a lot of Latin American Markets as well. I don’t work with the Latin Markets, but my comrade is always mentioning how all her consultants cannot be reached because of a holiday or another that has been declared a week long celebration.

And just try to get something done in the fall in Europe. You can’t. They have a more relaxed attitude than we do anyway, plus you have an entire month when they are on vacation. I have heard that the cities in Spain are just deserted in August because everyone is on holiday.

Anyway, the point of this whole thing is to gripe about America. Why don’t we have more holidays? We should be more like our foreign brethren/sisteren and have more public holidays. Everyone should get all the bank holidays off. We should have Columbus Day off. We can celebrate the completion of taxes by having Tax Day off. We should get at least a week off for Christmas.

We can also adopt some holidays from other countries. Let’s all have a day off for Australia Day. We can all celebrate Greenery Day with the Japanese. Harvest Moon Festival sounds fun, let’s have three days off for that.

By the time I’m done weeding down our work days, we’ll have about a three day work week (on average) and have about 210 paid vacation days. I think it’s brilliant!

Who’s with me?