Originally Posted by
Bergerie1
There are also lots of jobs in civvy street that require working over Christmas and other public holidays. What's so different?
I can confirm that ..
Civvy job, 365 x 20 (not quite 365x24), and we worked shifts covering 'morning/lunch' and 'afternoon evening'. Every year the bosses put up memos on the notice board reminding us that there would be no days-off over a 2-week period covering xmas and new-year We all moaned and grumbled, but got on with it. If you were lucky, your 'days-off' coincided with xmas, but then they wouldn't coincide with new-year; and vice-versa. Oddly enough, we worked with a lot of Asians (Indian or Pakistani descent), and there was never a ban on days-off over the periods of Diwali or Eid!
Also, the 'no days-off over xmas and NY' edict didn't seem to apply to the senior managers, so something usually happened to make them come into work at the most inconvenient time (for them).
One year, the top boss came in to see us all on xmas morning, maybe spread some cheer, shake hands and thank us personally for all our hard work. In a quite astonishing gift of personal generosity he bought in boxes and boxes of mince-pies for us all. There must have been 20 boxes in total, some for the morning shift and some for the afternoon shift. At vast personal expense he'd bought us Tesco mince-pies, so not really high quality ones. No cream, no brandy-butter, just cheap mince pies.
The boxes were duly opened and shared around, the boss did his 'thank you' speech. Somebody cheekily asked the boss what he got for xmas, and he asked the questioner what he'd got - the reply was (as he looked at the box of mince pies) "I got a single mince-pie with a 'best before' date of 2nd December".
Suddenly, nobody wanted mince-pies any more.