Day 785: A Cost Benefit Analysis of Local Holidays

If you haven’t figured it out already, but there are quite a few ‘costs’ and ‘benefits’ to being in the Foreign Service… I don’t really think you have to be inside the system to understand that.

Being a bit a math nut, like I am… I really enjoy analyzing those Costs vs Benefits of situations… it’s the core of basic decision making.

Now, let me just paint the scene for you here… I’m unaccompanied (without my family) in Pakistan… and frankly… there is NOTHING to do besides work… so I work… all the time.  I work, on average, 60 to 65 hours per week… that’s somewhere around ten hours a day (not including commute times and meals) six days a week.  And I’ve been doing this for over a month.  And frankly, I’m starting to feel it.

I’ve been dealing with a certain amount of fatigue… and I can feel burnout coming on.  As an actor, I spent enough years burning it from both ends to know when burnout is coming… and with me, burnout usually comes in the form of getting sick, something pretty nasty that lays me up for about a week.  So, I have to be careful… because being out of commission here has a negative cost/benefit outcome.  I’m looking for POSITIVE cost/benefit outcomes.

So… here I am starting to feel the schedule from the last month catching up on me… and I need a break… but when?  I’ve been taking Sunday’s off as a mental health day and that seems to help… but I’m still not bouncing back the way I would like.

Then comes our Eid holiday.

One of the major benefits of being in the Foreign Service is the extra holidays.  Not only do we get the US federal holidays off… but we also get a few of the local holidays as well.  And for Eid in Pakistan, we got Friday and Monday off. 

Now, as the Eid Holiday approached, I was planning to work… what else is there to do… and we get holiday premium pay when we work holidays, to staying at home didn’t make much sense… or so I thought.

The Thursday before the Eid holiday, I found out an interesting piece of information.  I am not eligible for premium holiday pay when I work local holidays (but I am when I work US holidays)… so… ummm… I had to ask a question:

“So, what you’re telling me is that I could come to work for eight hours… or I could sleep on my couch for eight hours… and I would get paid the same amount of money for the day?”

The answer was ‘yes.’

Folks… I hate to sound like an underachiever, but this was not a difficult decision to make.  Going to work on Friday and Monday became a negative cost/benefit outcome.    So… I took a nap.