25-Dec. Shout-out to everyone else at work
There are a few days every year that really show which jobs are vital and which can be left aside for a day. I started my car this morning (-32, -40 with wind chill). On my way to work I drove past a hospital and a care home, both were manned. The dairy farm had its lights on. A cop with his flashers drove past me on the way to some emergency. The macdonalds drive-through was open too. I had to be at work by 0600, but I was relieving someone who had been sitting in another office since 1800. On my computer were the same dozen emails I get every morning, each from someone else who drew the short straw.
There aren't many of us on HN that work weekends let alone Christmas morning, but If you too are sitting in a dark office remember that all across the world are millions of other people working the truly important jobs.
210 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 211 ms ] threadBut always dressing comfy means you never get to express that side. Having only used the office once a week in the last many months, I would consistently overdress when making an appearance. There is something nice about making an effort at dressing that correlates with wanting to make a bigger effort in general.
>> about making an effort at dressing that correlates with wanting to make a bigger effort in general.
If you want to make the effort, military uniforms allow that too. The military is full of people who put that extra effort into their uniforms every day. They have the mirror-polished boots, the perfectly-fitted shirts. Their patches and ribbons are always perfect. Their beret is moulded into that perfect shape. The average civi cannot spot it but everyone on a base can see who wears the uniform best.
Every drill sergeant is a diva. Every fighter pilot a slob who hasn't polished a boot since basic.
Not that any of that is better than being with family- just an added perspective. Happy holidays!
And I certainly appreciate all of those who work on the holidays to keep us safe.
https://youtu.be/aICaAEXDJQQ
I hope not. This one is only going to last 10 years. Kepler also only lasted 10 years. Given the time it took to build it, I hope the JWST's replacement is already well into development. The reality is that space telescopes are launched every couple years without much fanfare. This just happens to be a very big and expensive one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_telescopes
Refueling and refurbishment costs should become much more acceptable as viable approaches emerge due to dropping ticket cost to space.
In addition, the fuel required to position the spacecraft varies a lot depending on the day - and any fuel saved can be used to prolong the operational lifetime of the telescope.
[1] https://issfd.org/ISSFD_2014/ISSFD24_Paper_S2-6_Yu.pdf
What's up with this fixation people have with arbitrary dates for celebration?
Moreover, I find (for myself) very little celebratable about a time of year that :
- it's more expensive to fly during
- revolves around buying, just, stuff.
Viva la holiday revolucion. Let's all pick times that work for us and our loved ones and get off the monoculture train.
Would that be a part of your holiday revolución? :P
Granted a lot of that was scope creep but nonetheless, I'm betting it's not launch capacity that's the bottleneck.
Whatever follows probably won't be a big telescope. It'll be all the little experiments that couldn't find funding over those 30 years because there was nothing to launch them without breaking the budget. There's a lot of progress deferred because every launch had to be big.
It will be another infrared telescope. Hubble's capabilities have been all but surpassed by ground-based optics. Some of the new giant telescopes already being built will easily surpass Hubble (100+foot mirrors etc). What JWST does is see in infrared, something that ground-based telescopes can never do as IR is absorbed by atmosphere. So whatever replaces JWST will likely be another, bigger, IR telescope.
https://www.tmt.org/page/about
>>With its 30m diameter prime-mirror, TMT will be three times as wide, with nine times more area, than the largest currently existing visible-light telescope in the world. This will provide an unparalleled resolution, with TMT images more than 12 times sharper than those from the Hubble Space Telescope.
Sounds like you were on the team: If so, thanks for your contribution!
Are you allowed to stream video or audio?
One job, PC support could be brutally busy.
The other, tech support for some high end networking equipment was very quiet. I loved working holidays there. Mostly just played video games.
Always strange how the jobs that pay less often are more work / tiresome.
I remember reading a story about Jim Mattis (back before he was famous). A fellow general showed up, found Gen. Mattis was the duty officer on Christmas Day, and asked him how he got stuck with that.
Gen. Mattis told him, “Well, the young man who was scheduled for duty today has a family, and I decided it was more important for him to spend the time with them. So I took his place.”
Working at the hospital is a vital job, keeping an important server running is a vital job and driving a mass transit bus is a vital job as well.
On the other hand keeping McDonald's open is not vital, it is just economically sensible.
How come it is illegal to keep them open during public holidays in much of Europe then? I find hospitals a tad more important.
I hear what you are saying. Gas stations are vital transitively from the vital jobs that require gas, such as ambulance services. But I could still rank them as less vital than the services themselves, enabling me to at least close some gas stations. Fast food would be far down the list because it is predictable and trivial to plan around.
It can take some real planning to figure out how to deal with that first week.
High five to all of you at work today!
There is that sort of special vibe with the other people working though. Same as an overnight deployment when everyone else is asleep
I always thought it would make sense to let us handle Xmas duty so others — people for whom it really, really matters - can do their Xmas stuff.
I used to try to volunteer for this when it was relevant (really, it’s not a thing for me), but I rarely saw a systematic opportunity to do so.
I think it gets harder as time goes because the replacement day (say a random day in Jun) isn’t as quiet because the rest of the economy is not turned off.
I have fond memories of christmas dinner as a child/teenager, not because of any religious affiliation but because it was one of the few times a year the family of six, three of which work in hospitals, spent a day or so together. There were few overlaps of free time otherwise.
I don't remember the exact mechanics how it worked, but I think work schedules get set about 6 months in advance with some employee input about their preferences, and employees can to a degree swap shifts with each other. So e.g. it was quite common for people with kids to take christmas off, whereas young singles or from different backgrounds took new years or any other day.
Glad that’s over.
Pre pandemic there was always a cool feel of working a chill holiday day with just a few others, compared to the insanity of those massive scale days. You also got to work on whatever you wanted as managers didn't plan anything.
While factually correct, a more elegant wording to express this would be “colleagues from India and China”.
Please also note that Christmas is not a thing for a lot of people. Jews, Chinese, Muslims.
(Yes, when you've got enough diversity of cultures & religions, shifts can be swapped around so that nobody has to work... Nice, except that being one of those who work on those days is also something special.)
It is a cultural holiday, not a religious holiday. This is a very important point.
This also says nothing of the Orthodox Christians that celebrate Christmas on a different day. The distinction is pretty clear for them - Dec 25 is purely a holiday, since that's not the day they celebrate the birth of Jesus.
Your mileage may vary, and if it does involve religion good for you, but for millions it doesn’t, but it’s still the most wonderful time of the year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ēostre
Stop trying to shove it down everyone's throat.
I spent today (in London) at synagogue.
The world doesn't stop because it's some made up day on the calendar. Thank you to all those who keep the world going.
A long day, but it was satisfying.
Plus the animals don’t know it’s Christmas.