It’s one of my favorite English (as in Merrie Olde England) phrases: busman’s holiday. As a child, I was able to elicit the meaning from the context in which I normally read it: to take a busman’s holiday is to work, or at the very least to visit your workplace, on your day off. But what is a “busman”, and why do they work on their days off?
You can read a comprehensive attempt to explain the phrase here, but I’ll excerpt the relevant part:
Busman’s holiday is originally British, dating from the end of the nineteenth century. It initially spread to other countries through reports of London affairs and then caught on locally. It appeared in the Sunday Times of Sydney, Australia, in May 1896 and the Auckland Star of New Zealand in October 1902. It reached North America in 1909. It’s now known throughout the English-speaking world.
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Some writers on etymology have got into a mess trying to explain it.
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A typical story appeared in John Ciardi’s A Browser’s Dictionary in 1981: “British drivers of horse-drawn omnibuses, becoming attached to their teams, were uneasy about turning them over to relief drivers who might abuse them. On their days off, therefore, the drivers regularly went to the stables to see that the horses were properly harnessed, and returned at night to see that they had not been abused”. A similar tale is told by William and Mary Morris in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, except that they assert that the most caring drivers, should they have any reason to fear abuse would occur, would sit among the passengers to observe the relief driver’s behaviour. A related explanation was given in the Brownsville Daily Herald of Texas on 2 September 1909: “When a London omnibus driver takes a day off it is supposed that he spends it riding around on the top of a friend’s ‘bus, seeing how he does things.”
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Other writers are justly scornful of such sentimental explanations. Anyone who has looked into the history of nineteenth-century London buses will know that their horses were no better cared for than any other working nags and that they were often sweated to death.
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The most plausible explanation given by writers who seek to explain matters is that a popular day out among working-class Londoners in the late nineteenth century was to make an excursion by bus. A bus driver or conductor who went on such a trip was said to be taking a busman’s holiday.
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However, the earliest examples point to its instead being humorous urban folklore.
I had a relatively short lunch hour available today, so I decided to run over to the Potbelly sandwich shop where I am an occasional lunchtime “musician”. The best parking spot in the lot was available, so I took it without guilt; when I’m playing there, I’m expected to park as far away as possible. I had a variety of conversations with the staff, some of whom thought I was there to pick up the Tuesday shift since their regular fellow had gone missing. In my eagerness to idly chat, I stayed just a bit too long, making it necessary for me to pick up the pace on the way back.
When I got back to work, I had a text from a friend. He’d been behind me on the street, full-throttle in his Acura, trying to keep up with me, but the ZX-14R had floated effortlessly away. I hadn’t been trying to really hustle but I do recall seeing triple digits for most of the return trip although I have fifty miles of left of the break-in period. Even short-shifting at 6000rpm, the big green Kwacker is too fast for a street car at maximum attack. I could not be happier with this stout-hearted steed of a motorcycle, even if it kills me tomorrow morning.
What’s the future of phrases like “busman’s holiday?” They were the memes of their age, swelling in strength with every in-print repetition, adding judicious amounts of flavor to our discourse like carefully metered spices. Today’s educated youngsters are, of course, absolutely obsessed with spice and flavor in their food — but they have very little patience with, or time for, nuanced gradations of meaning within the written word.
Yet the idea of the busman’s holiday will long outlast the term itself. We are all permanently leashed to our jobs now, whether through a BlackBerry or some deplorable “bring your own device” scheme at work. Even fast-food fry cooks are expected to be reachable via phone or text. The notion that a man was his own master when he drove out of the company parking lot in the evening has long since been rendered laughable. Take note, fellow busmen; the holiday’s over.
Try being self employed. You then have many bosses, customers, all of whom have no qualms about calling at all hours. Who cares that you are 4 time zones away, “I’m working so you must be too”.
” I hadn’t been trying to really hustle but I do recall seeing triple digits for most of the return trip although I have fifty miles of left of the break-in period. Even short-shifting at 6000rpm, the big green Kwacker is too fast for a street car at maximum attack.”
I would never have the stones to do things like that. part of why I didn’t start riding until I was 38. Just can’t put aside thoughts about the worst that could happen.
“Yet the idea of the busman’s holiday will long outlast the term itself. We are all permanently leashed to our jobs now, whether through a BlackBerry or some deplorable “bring your own device” scheme at work.”
1) there are a surprising number of people- usually Apple fans- who beg for BYOD
2) someone setting up a meeting at 11:30 and calling it a “working lunch” makes me seethe with rage.
I can say your self preservation strategy is definitely better than mine. I usually think about the worst than could happen after I do something stupid like going triple digit speeds.
Might well have to come by this place when we drive up from Texas next week.
Ha ha, Suckers!
I don’t even own a cell phone.
When I worked for a semiconductor company (writing drivers for cell phone GPUs) my coworkers always seemed confused about that.
If I ever thought owning one would be a benefit I’d get one but there’s about two times a year I think I’d find them useful so it’s just not worth the hassle or cost.
The holiday is over because working stiffs are stuck in a permanent busman’s holiday.
It’d just be nice if all this work went to something good - I hear older people in my office complain about the pace but as a graduate of 2010 this has been the status quo for my working life. Where I work, people take it as a badge of honor to be the last person bailing the water out of the sinking ship.
Modern world right? We can toss money, effort, and consultants at problem but most of us are people who are paid to do things ‘right’ and the people in charge of making sure we’re doing the ‘right’ things aren’t. The Obamacare website cost quite a bit more than the Manhattan project (inflation adjusted). And the time between the Obamacare becoming law and the website launching successfully was greater than the time between pearl harbor and V-J day.
At least we got some cool bikes from Japan. Maybe 70 years from now, Obamacare will give us something good like phenmetrazine drips in our citizen’s camps. Or some sweet american flag / DNC sponsorship stickers for all the morbidly obese cruising to 7/11 for a slushy atop expensive electric wheel chairs.
The Obamacare website cost quite a bit more than the Manhattan project (inflation adjusted dollars)
Corrected -
The Obamacare website cost more than the Manhattan project (constant dollars).
Inflation adjusted, the Manhattan project was about $26 billion. Or about the price of about a month of the war on terror. or 5x as much as the war on ISIS.
I was almost ready to comment that that fact makes me so depressed, but I’ve witnessed enough special snowflake meltdown this week to refrain. So after a quick thought……f’ it. Correct observation is a) why am I not surprised and b) and I can’t wait to see how they attempt to get this train wreck back on the rails.
The B-29 program cost 50% more than the Gadget and only Fifi and Doc survive.
“Where I work, people take it as a badge of honor to be the last person bailing the water out of the sinking ship.”
We’ve learned the wrong lessons from the Japanese.
“The Obamacare website cost more than the Manhattan project (constant dollars).”
I’ve never cared for these kinds of comparisons. they usually ignore a ton of stuff that legitimately contributed to it. a former boss of mine used to grumble about how big operating systems and software have become, moaning “we did the flight control systems on the F-117 in 64 kB, but Windows is 3 GB.” which is a pointless comparison; the flight control/avionics software has a very specific job to do, and only that job, and on purpose-built hardware. a general purpose operating system has to both run the system and provide libraries and driver interfaces for other general purpose software to use, and it has to be able to cover a wide range of use cases. We used to have an operating system which could run in a system with 64 kB of memory, it was called DOS. Compared to what we use computers for today, it couldn’t do shit.
so I could see the cost of getting Obamacare up and running in its entirety to be $26bn including the website. but not just for the site itself.
I’ve actually scheduled vacation days on my calendar (although I didn’t eventually count them against my vacation time) just to avoid meetings. I’d then sneak into the office, shut the door, and spend the entire day playing catch-up on paperwork, project work, etc. without any interruptions. When people found out what I was doing, there was some pissy responses but so far it’s the only method I have to get things done.
My company tried to institute a policy whereby you’d have to schedule (and take) a real vacation day on Friday in order to avoid call-out on the weekend. Otherwise, you were considered on 24-hr call at all times. They’ve since walked that one back after a damn-near mutiny. I still get calls almost every weekend, but most I can handle without driving in. So yeah, 100% on the leash to the company. That’s the way of things now.
I used to love defending covenant not to compete / non-solicitation cases, particularly dealing with the devices. It used to drive opposing counsel and their mega firm client up the wall when they couldn’t hang my guy over breaking IT policy, or that we’d hold the laptop hostage, er safe, until the final checks cleared and then send it back via FedEx ground. Heh. Not to sound cliche - but some of the best client advice I gave came straight out of the Wire.
Also, watch that triple-digit speed. I’ve now seen three times a police officer absolutely yank his cruiser in front of a motorcycle in order to perform a traffic stop. In all three cases it was absolutely not necessary and could have been deadly to the motorcyclist. One poor guy was stuck on a road with no side streets or turn-offs, so he slowly (30 mph or so) continued on knowing there was a parking lot about a half mile down that he could pull into. The cop could’ve just followed and written him up there, but instead gunned the crown vic, swerved around him, hit the brakes and skidded to a stop sideways in front of the bike, blocking two lanes of traffic.
It seems that cops think all bikers are going run and would prefer to ram the bikes rather than let them go.
My policy with cops when I’m on the bike is either I’ll pull over immediately or I’ll skedaddle immediately. I don’t trust cops not to kill me out of stupidity or incompetence behind the wheel.
My feeling is that with self-driving cars, we’ll be expected to work while the car drives us back and forth to work. My real nightmare is we find some way to enter our minds while we sleep, and we end up working there too. We’ll be expected to eat, breathe and sleep work. I think I’d kill myself first.
I work in healthcare so your short essay will be discussed at our next literature review. Even when not engaged in saving lives, relieving suffering, wiping bottoms, or delivering warm blankets, healthcare workers find themselves sitting in hours of training, meetings & chart reviews to make medical practice safer & better. Now I have a new phrase to describe my time at County General on my off days.
First, is a green Kawasaki invisible to cops? I’m the world’s unluckiest person and take every precaution imaginable (constant scanning, knowledge of radar traps, run a V-1 constantly in a state that mainly uses radar), and yet still managed to get pulled over in a goddamn Honda Insight for 83/70 by a state Liquor control cop who flipped on his radar (why they need radar is beyond me) in an unmarked Ford Edge on an otherwise empty highway. Such is my lot in life. I also learned they had uniforms that day.
Second, I think the number of people who actually must take a busman’s holiday to remain employed is much smaller than those who willingly do it to gain brownie points with Quetzalcoatl. I’m in a field that demands exceptional client service, but have worked hard over the past few years to set reasonable availability expectations with no ill effects on career progression. My clients know I’ll do everything I can to get the job done, and when I’m not available, that someone else will either seamlessly step up to the plate or the job will get done on-time regardless of whether I answer their email at 8pm or 8am.
“Second, I think the number of people who actually must take a busman’s holiday to remain employed is much smaller than those who willingly do it to gain brownie points with Quetzalcoatl.”
Brilliant turn of phrase right there!
Had he been spared ruination at the hands of a bad parent, Harambe would have fucking loved that bike. It’s the silver-backed gorilla of the hyper-touring world.
Unfortunately there is a war on literacy, and those fun and descriptive old-timey phrases are being battered into unrecognizable shapes out of sheer ignorance. Malapropism is the new standard:
- ‘concerning’ doesn’t mean ‘about’ or ‘with regards to’ anymore
- could/would of
- ‘flush’ something out when the speaker means ‘flesh out’ but should just use other words entirely because they don’t know what the fuck they’re saying
- ad infinitum
I blame the internets - look at what it’s done to my punctuation.
I don’t think this is new.
As far as I can tell, few people excel at using or understanding subtleties of language, just as few excel at advanced mathematics or understanding very complex logical systems. Difference is, you don’t actually see people dealing with these things unless you work with them in situations where they’re used, in which case they should be expert.
But, almost everyone uses the written word in public, now that the internet and text may be used as much or more than face-to-face verbal communication. So, deficiencies in this singular aspect are on permanent display, and are unfortunately used to judge value. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, as I usually become dismissive when someone’s unable to coherently express something, or when their opinion seems to obviously fail to understand its opposition. These are often, probably (hopefully,) failings of language rather than of personality.
Full disclosure, my “real” education ends around 8th grade, online discalculia tests tell me I’m wholly fucked (of course with softened wording that hedges their lack of reliability,) and I’ve had almost a liter of Bacardi so if this doesn’t make sense at least I have an excuse.
Let’s nip this in the butt.
Pedantry flares up now and then, like IBS.
I don’t take busman’s holidays, I take real holidays. The secret is to obtain a skill set that is very unique and very valuable. Then don’t buy a bunch of crap and save a lot of money, then you are in a fuck you situation. I am just returning to my old job after a 3 month “sabbatical” - hiking, biking, boating, chilling, and traveling around the world. I did zero work for those three months. People ask me how I got the time off and I just say I told them I quit, and they knew I was serious. They begged me not to quit outright and they paid my benefits while I was gone. I realize I am a lucky SOB, but it is not all luck.
When I was much younger and I was just starting my first real job I worked 100-120 hours a week for three years.
I was happy to do it then because I learned an incredible amount of stuff and the job was pretty fun to do.
When I had finally had enough I took one lesson away:
No matter how much work you get done today, there is an infinite amount to do tomorrow. Get done what you can and don’t worry about how much is left to do.
Ahh sometimes I get upset with my job then I realize how little stress I have compared to past jobs and no worry about working on weekends and holidays. I guess there is a reason I stay around.
Being willing to live within your means makes it easy to o get sucked into this B.S. ~ I don’t take jobs that don’t have well defined hours and when they try to yank my chain I use Federal Workplace Law language to make them stop .
I’m always early and reliable but when the clock stops so do I .
If I lose a job (so far so good) it must have been a crappy job I didn’t really like anyway, right ? .
Agreed about that serious lack of language comprehension ~ I have this issue my own self .
-Nate
Amen, to a whole bunch of these posts