I hear some people have unnatural fears of unplugging while they are on vacation. They are so afraid they will miss something. During my week-long vacation to Israel, I rarely checked work email and felt no real responsibility to check in otherwise but occasionally took a few minutes during a long, quiet bus ride to check in thanks to the driver Saher turning his iPhone into a hotspot.
That’s when it happened. I’d check my email, Facebook & twitter mentions, and see if family or friends were on IM. I rarely scanned feeds to see what was happening, assuming someone would get in touch with me directly if something important was going on. And in fact they did!
- Jesse R. Bussard (Twitter & blog) was among the first. She alerted me to an NPR piece on cotton and the fact that maybe folks looking for a high tech job should think about cotton. The piece talks about while the Silicon Valley & Boston’s biotech businesses may get attention, working in a greenhouse with cotton is among the high tech jobs in the marketplace.
- Maru Whitmore (Twitter & blog) was nice enough to flag a CNN Mexico piece about cotton. Since it is in SPanish, I’m thankful for Maru’s explanation she gave me “More links!!! This is a good one! Talks about how GMO cotton seeds need less water to produce more cotton. ‘The dark side of organic cotton.'”
- Brent Boersma (Twitter & now blogging) highlighted the Wired article that gets a mention in the NPR piece. I love the graphic text that says “Blue collar jobs have taken a beating, but what remains of them is more sophisticated, more skilled. And cotton — spur to the first Industrial Revolution — is once again leading the way.
- Another friend has tempted me about having taken photos of a cotton koozie at the Indy 500…. I await the follow-up with great interest!
Thanks to all the folks above and others (especially some awesome coworkers who kept me in the dark about meetings, drafts and calls that came in) who let me take a real break! Makes coming back a lot easier even if my work inbox was out of this world!
It’s interesting. When I left my old job to start farming, I gladly left my company Blackberry behind. I could be reached anywhere, anytime and was expected to answer 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, vacation or not. Now that I have my own personal smartphone and having started tweeting and blogging and have a facebook fan page I have quite a bit of info to keep track of. The only the difference is that none of that is mission critical to my job now, so it’s easier for me to take a break, and I do from time to time. I feel that disconnected feeling, but it sure is nice to unplug for while and be out of touch.
It really is nice!