I did take Friday off from work. I don't know if I was supposed to or not. The day after Christmas is, at least in the United States, not traditionally a day off, but with Christmas on a Thursday that makes the temptation to produce a long holiday almost irresistible, the way it is the day after Thanksgiving. But as the whole Columbus Day fiasco suggests I don't get a lot of guidance about what are normal working days and what ones aren't, and the fact that the company has an interior side with people like me who interact with clients only rarely or maybe not at all, and those on the first floor who actually have responsibilities to people outside the company, makes things the more odd.
I had been going in earlier the week hoping someone would think to tell me, but the best I got was one of the people from the first floor asking me if I was coming in Friday, which lead to a discussion that ended up taking forty minutes and didn't resolve anything. But the preponderance of evidence seemed to be that there were only two people scheduled to work Friday --- he was one of them --- and they were expecting to go home after lunch anyway because nobody was really going to be around and the only work was going to be answering wrong numbers.
So ultimately I had to conclude: almost nobody was going to be in Friday anyway (including the office manager and the owner); there wasn't anything I was doing that needed to be done particularly by any time; the only people know to be coming in were those who actually handled clients and who knew the clients were going to be off anyway; in all, is this really worth getting up before 6:30 am? This might be taken to reflect a loss of morale on my part, although it's more that I'd rather sleep in.
Trivia: James Gordon Bennet Junior, son of the New York Herald publisher, created the New York Telegram, which was originally printed on pink paper. Source: The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger.
Currently Reading: A Thin Cosmic Rain: Particles From Outer Space, Michael W Friedlander.