If I would not see the author's name that it is indeed my old friend Hans starting his career in non-tech writing, I would think it was Joel writing. By the way I can see Joel online as I write this post and think he would reply almost immediately. <p>You remind me of the movie "Terminator" where the lady asks Reese (it has been over 20 years so I dont remember the name exactly), as to how he overcomes the pain. His reply was that he just "disconnects" it! <p>When I start a project, I fail to disconnect with it even when it goes live, is in production support, and is none of my business anymore. <p>So I would always carry my blackberry on vacations. While I check my normal email at the end of the day, I have a secret email known only to the machine and my boss. That one beeps. <p>This gives me peace of mind that nothing is going wrong while I am away on vacation. It is just a mental state which you may call "Failure to Disconnect".

I agree with you 100% Hans - and as far as the wilderness goes I'd also like to see a ban on Jet skis and (if used simply for racing around) Snowmobiles. <p>Back in the days when I worked for IBM followed your doctrine almost religiously. However, since becoming self-employed things have been very different. The longest time I have spent without checking email has been two business days. <p>In part I can thank the spammers for that. When we first started I used an "Out of Office" message to tell people that I was away for a few days. The only result as far as I can tell was that within a week my daily spam volume doubled. Since then I have not used the OOO setting. <p>This leaves me with a problem as unlike a contractor with a set number of clients I am completely reliant for my business on responding to queries as soon as they come in. If someone needs training they need it now - and a lack of response is taken as a lack of interest. These opportunities don't come up often enough to be able to ignore even one. <p>Therein lies the problem of the small business - you can't afford to hire office staff and you can't afford to miss business.

Agree with the premise of disconnection and also appreciate how difficult it can be. I also appreciate the variable situations people have. <p>I never had a cell phone until several years ago my employer mandated it. Call me a Luddite, but I just didn't want to be bothered. <p>Now, I can be bugged 7 by 24 by 365, but my work is usually not the bugger and I'm not the buggee - I'm just the middleman. It's my wife, who runs an assisted living facility and assists in running the attached nursing home. Many of those 2AM calls are nurse's aides/LPNs asking what to do with clients in medical situations. Usually, these issues are simple and straight-forward, but someone with the proper professional license (my wife) must make the decision. <p>For handling my vacation, my manager and I set some guidelines as to what constitutes an emergency. Anything that can be deferred is deferred since they aren't true emergencies. If there are tasks that only I can do and the must be done before I return, I will do them - but only them. I use my manager and my team leader as filters to prevent the non-critical, non-emergency stuff from getting through to me. <p>I used to check email daily when on vacation - I now check no more than twice a week and aim for only once a week. I hate coming back after 3 weeks off and being confronted with several thousand e-mails in my queue - few things are more depressing. <p>Every task that can be, is delegated to somebody else. I also attempt (but not always succeed) to have a backup for all urgent work. <p>Now, this doesn't eliminate every item of work during vacation, so I do plan for a few hours in a week of vacation to handle the truly emergency stuff. <p>The last thing that needs to be disconnected is your mind - that is often harder to turn off. I generally find something else to think about - crowding out the thinking about work. <p>So yes, I take the laptop, cell phone and a good book with me. The laptop stays off nearly all of the time. These strategies seem to work for me, they may not work for others. <p>Gracious, I've been on too long... resuming vacation mode. <p>Vacationer

My wife and I have a pop-up camper. I never check email when camping. I do use my cell phone. It's convenient for my wife and I to call each other while camping if we get separated with the kids, if we can get a signal at the campground. <p>Oh, I will use the cell phone to call a friend to do google searches for me if I can't find the campground while driving there and the campground won't answer the phone. I guess that counts as indirect internet access, huh? <p>I prefer sitting by a nice campfire and eating smores than coding in RPG any day! <p>Chris

I have my camper in place where I cannot receive cell or Blackberry Data service. Call it plausible deniability!

I too am dressed with laptop, cell-card, cell-phone, and 24-7-365 or 366 callability during leap years. Much has to do with what you write, what shifts your user's work, and in what states and time-zones you're covering. So...Easy recovery is always applied to my apps where applicable and documenting that recovery process in a really big font. <p>Anyway...remember when you went home at five. Cell-phones were big as shoe-boxes and nobody had them. You couldn't be called because your line was busy on the dial-up. (9600 baud syncronous modems) Remember when you could smoke right in your cubicle? And colleagues would throw bad 8" diskettes around the office like frisbees...Ouch! They hurt.

Re jetskis, once this summer when we were up at Golden Lake, my sister-in-law's boyfriend worked hard all day to get his jet ski in the water. At around 8:30PM, he had it in the water and running, and the two of them were off. Fortunately, their neighbor followed them in his jet ski. After about an hour, when it was getting dark out, they came back, towed back by the neighbor! <p>I'm not a big fan of powered water craft. Give me a canoe or sailboat any time. <p>Anyhoo, if you decide you need to hire staff, give me a shout. Summer's over, and I got to think about looking for a new job! We all need to take time away from our responsibilities sometimes. Or perhaps, you and Susan could take separate vacations? <p>Cheers! Hans

Ditch the cell phones and get a set of FRS radios, a pair for the parents, and one for each kid. You can stay in contact, and the kids will have lots of fun with them too. <p>We did bring our cell phone with us to Golden Lake. But coverage in the Ottawa Valley is pretty spotty. Apart from the larger towns, the cell phone was all but useless.

Hassan wrote: "<em>If I would not see the author's name that it is indeed my old friend Hans starting his career in non-tech writing, I would think it was Joel writing.</em>" <p>Hi Hassan! It would be great if I could make a living writing. But even if Victoria does invite me back (and I hope she does!), I doubt it would be enough to live on. I got to get off my fat lazy butt sometime soon and look for a programming job. Based on my last three years of zSeries programming experience, I think what I <em>really</em> want is a job in an iSeries shop! <p>Cheers! Hans

even when i got sent to iraq a few years ago, i did some work for the company, there. <p>it was nearly nine months before they had an internet connection where i was stationed. i emailed my family, friends and co-workers. family and friend said the missed and loved me, co-workers wanted help with a /FREE program, because they did not even attempt to understand its syntax......arrgghhh! <p>-sarge

Even when the dentist looks at my molars and says, "Doing a lot of User support lately...???"...and I reply, "No, Just doing a lot of thinking lately...For people that don't do it themselves!!!". Well I still get something good out of it...The persception that they need me.

<i>"perhaps, you and Susan could take separate vacations?"</i> <p>We have discussed what a low percent of couples are still married to their original spouses. Add seniors factor to it and it goes lower. Add IT factor and it becomes almost invisible (Here we are talking about TWO IT factors). <p>Indeed Par-tner is a role model couple for all us in the IT field. (30+ together?). Do not give these type of advices to this IT icon. :)

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Indeed Par-tner is a role model couple for all us in the IT field. (30+ together?). Do not give these type of advices to this IT icon. :) <p>Sorry to have to disillusion you Hassan - but it is actually "second time around" for both Susan and myself. We have been together now for about 14 years. <p>And we have no intention of taking separate vacations - at least Susan has told me I'm doing that any time soon ;-)