Crabs in a bucket
Hello, for those of us in the northern hemisphere1, summer is coming. For some of you that means vacation2!
As a public service, here’s an excerpt from the revised and updated Design Is a Job3, The Necessary Second Edition about vacation:
My grandfather was a man of questionable ideas carried out under the guise of learning experiences. Among these were the ideas that anything worth knowing could be learned at a county fair, a child should know how to siphon gas, and—for our purposes today—the only way to buy fish was at a small-town coastal fish market at 5 a.m. as it came off the boats. Mind you, I’m not saying he was wrong about any of these things, just that you don’t tend to fully appreciate them as a child. It was during one of these trips to the fish market that I stumbled onto a large industrial-sized bucket of crabs. I watched for a while as the crabs climbed over one another trying to escape the bucket. Just as it looked like one was about to make it to freedom, a crab below would reach out and drag it back into the bucket.
“Grandpa, why don’t they put a lid on the crab bucket?”
“Don’t have to. The crabs pull one another down. In fact, the easier you make it look for them, the more vicious they get about pulling one another down.”
“Is this a metaphor?”
Fast forward a few decades and I’m talking to a friend of mine who works in tech. We’re about a year into the pandemic. She’s telling me how exhausted she is and that she really needs some time off.
“Don’t you have unlimited paid time off?”
“Yeah, but if you take any everyone looks at you funny.”
Crabs in a bucket.
When vacations were doled out as a set amount of time people took them. Two weeks, three weeks, a month for our European friends, it was easy. Everyone scheduled theirs, and when it popped up on your calendar the man took his foot off your neck and off you went on a modest little trip to the coast to look at crabs. There was a lid on the bucket, and you knew exactly when it opened and for how long.
At some point, capitalism visited a fish market, spotted the bucket of crabs, and invented unlimited PTO. Now management doesn’t have to track anyone’s vacation time because everyone’s afraid to take it so they don’t get side-eyed by the other workers.
Don’t get played like that. If someone hands you unlimited PTO you take it. And if your coworker says they’re taking a long weekend, the only acceptable reply is “That sounds amazing. I’m going to take one, too!” Beware of policies that pit workers against one another. Work together and you can all make it out of the bucket.
There’s more good advice, and possibly even another story about my grandfather in this zine. $9 cheap. Comes with stickers.
I’m running a Presenting w/Confidence workshop on June 27 & 28. (Also really handy for getting good at job interviews.4) Sign up!
Erika is painting chickens and writing a book.
Ethically and morally speaking, this is the shittier of our two hemispheres. Also, I just discovered that Buttondown does footnotes, so I’ll be adding footnotes to newsletters way past the point at which they’re funny, which is right about now.
Yep, it’s stuck in my head too. Yes, I could’ve just linked to it directly in the text, but see previous footnote.
Available here: https://www.designisajob.com/.
Jobs are objectively terrible. You don’t need one. You do, however, need money. And while jobs might be the easiest way to make money, they are also the worst way to make money. I’m spending my summer watching heist movies, at which point I’ll have more to say about this.