You know how I said yesterday that there is a special place in hell for customers who don’t respect their partners’ time off and give them work to do even before they return from vacation? Well, there’s also a special place in hell when your sales partner decides to put an 8pm local time meeting on your calendar for the day you get back — a meeting that you have to lead, put together a deck for, and do the majority of the talking at. Granted, this customer is APAC based, so it’s not like any time is going to be ideal since we are on the east coast of the U.S., but this really, really sucked and was NOT good. Couldn’t I have at least gotten one day to settle back in after six days out, or is that too much to ask your colleagues?

In the end, this group I was working with was very fun and pleasant, so it was a good meeting at the end of the day (literally), but I still wasn’t pleased to take a call so late on my first day back. It’s no wonder people in other countries take longer periods off… it’s because they want to avoid work as much as possible for as long as possible in a single go.