After several weeks, I was on a team call this afternoon. Today was our first full day back from our month-long trip away, so it was definitely a mental adjustment for me. We started the call with a usual round-robin, and the topic was what our holiday highlights were. Our manager framed it as, “What was the most exciting thing you did during the holiday break?”

Let’s keep in mind that my company currently gives just Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day off as official company holidays during this period. New Year’s Eve is not a recognized company holiday. The company does not give Christmas Eve through New Year’s Day off like I hear a number of companies do even in the U.S. Back in my digital agency days, we had that entire week off (on top of accrued paid time off), and it was really nice to know that no one was actually online during that time. So whenever colleagues here refer to the “holiday break,” I always chuckle because… it’s not like our offices were closed for an entire week. What’s implied and understood, though no one wants to say it out loud, is that this is an extremely slow period, one during which the vast majority of our customer contacts are out. And being customer facing, if all our customers are away… that means we don’t have that much to do. We just need to monitor our inboxes, ensure any internal tasks are completed, and that’s it. So in reality, we’re not actually doing much work at all.

We went around the Zoom “circle,” and each person gave their update. It was mostly of the same theme: being happy to spend time with family, hosting Christmas or Christmas Eve dinner, taking kids to see X big event/show. I was the only one on the team who was away from home for this period. So when it was my turn, I said that my highlight was snorkeling in Cebu on New Year’s Day. The majority of my team doesn’t travel much at all (unless it’s a cruise), and they also don’t get excited to hear about other people’s travel plans. So their eyes mostly glazed over at my snorkeling activity. Fun.

I don’t expect everyone to travel, and I definitely don’t expect everyone to travel as much as we do. But in these moments, I do sometimes feel bored and get annoyed that everything with my colleagues can seem quite dull. I can’t really have that many interesting conversations about food, culture, or travel with anyone at work because most people don’t care about that stuff; it almost seems like a theme of the majority of the teams I’ve worked on. Even the people who claim to have traveled a lot or have taken a year off to travel don’t go to destinations that are that off the beaten path.

So while I am physically back in New York, in front of my two-monitor computer setup, and back online most of the day, my mind is still at Diniwid Beach in Boracay, sipping calamansi juice and endless all-mango smoothies.