Friday, April 23, 2010

Don't you hate it when your Mother is right?

I work in a church.

I've been doing that for 12 months now.

As a result I had some annual leave ready to be taken, so I took three weeks off, 15 days of which were spent overseas.

I needed the rest of those days because the house is a mess and I needed to see if there was still a desk in my office under about 3 months worth of study books, commentaries, miscellaneous paperwork and puppet prop creation paraphernalia.

There is. I can see parts of it now.

The extra days are also useful for the de-jet-lag-ation. I didn't think there would be anything much when you've come back from the equivalent of Western Australia (Malaysia and Singapore are only 2 hours behind). Maybe its just the whole deciding to watch movies on the plane thing, or maybe I just acclimatised really well to the sleeping in an extra two hours every day thing while we were away.

My mother has commented since I've been working in the church that you just can't take holidays at home when you work in the church, because people know you're there. You have to go away.

However, in my innocence I thought that I would be able to quietly slip home and get a whole lot of stuff done before anyone had realised that I was actually back in town.

But...

My partner in crime in the church knew we were getting back early this week, and she's been telling everyone that we'd be back, and organising meetings for this week. Grrrr.

I went to one of the meetings, and organised name tags for another thing, but was a bit cranky about it.

The chance that I'm going to do anything else until next week?

... APPROXIMATELY NONE!!!

6 comments:

Emily Sue said...

Yeah, churches are great at using and abusing their staff in the name of Christian ministry. And you can't complain about it because you're supposed to have a servant heart, right. Grrr. Sorry... this is an issue that is a sore point with me. In what other industry would you be expected to come to meetings when you're on holidays, or work a whole lot of unpaid hours, or be on call 24/7? Very few, and mostly the ones that pay the mega-bucks. Yet we expect ministry staff to do it all the time - how is that caring for each other?

Sorry. Rant over. As you were.

Wendy said...

Yep, we have the same problem in our profession! I'm getting good at saying "No".

Givinya De Elba said...

Oh no. That is so not cool.

HEY I've had a GREAT idea!
Leave home!
Come to MY house until the end of your leave!
And then you could clear up MY desk!


Win-win-win-win-win!

Emily Sue said...

Or come to MY house. My desk is already clear, and I'll teach you to make risotto. :)

Aleta said...

It's true.... if you don't go away for vacation, you might as well be at work :(

Allegro ma non troppo said...

Don't answer the phone this week? How would that go?