Vacations are wonderful! Or at least, they should be. Unless you are the boss, then it is management's responsibility to have adequate coverage for vacation time. Many workers get two weeks or more of vacation each year. Management should not plan for all employees to work 52 weeks. They should plan for 50 weeks (with two weeks vacation) minus holidays, minus weekends, minus a handful of sick days.

As I am also a project manager in IT, I feel the pain of the folks who don't want to leave things to others. My projects are my babies. However, my current boss (who's last day with the company is today) developed our team so that everyone has a backup. Now we are take vacations reasonably without stressing too much about work. Of course some of us still keep on e-mail and will call in for emergencies (guilty!) but at least we aren't expected to work 60 hours the weeks before and after a week off.

My wife, on the other hand, is in accounting and whenever she wants to take off, she feels that she has to bust her tail beforehand to get everything 'ahead'. The multi-billion dollar company she works for could hire more people but that would make too much sense... 😀

John