Bonjour!

Just as in any job, vacations must be scheduled around busy times.

Problem is, at Johnson County’s election office, we haven’t had a slow period for more than 10 years.

We have several employees who have hit their maximum accrual for vacation hours.

With April elections, spring break trips are out.  In even years, with an August primary, summer vacations are, likewise, a no-go. 

In fact, our employees often don’t get to take the Veterans Day Holiday in November because we’re either preparing for an election canvass or potential recount.

The two weeks around Christmas and New Years’ Day has become the best chance for many of us to take time away from the office.  May and June in odd years usually is good, too.  We have many employees out at some point this month.

That was my plan as well when scheduling a family vacation that exhausted our savings and planning skills; I’m blogging right now from Europe, on a train from London to France.

The trip was carefully scheduled around our elections, but, of course, we now have a special election underway.  I’m not sure our staff would agree, but I’m coming to like waking up in a time zone 7 hours ahead and being able to review and weigh in on things while they sleep.

It’s possible I’ll be blogging between now and my return, but I wanted to post this so you knew I wasn’t loafing.  Actually, I am loafing, but it was a planned outage.

(And trivia fact for the day, when accessing Blogger in France, even logged in, all the prompts are in French).