Are you on vacation these last few days of August? If so then what are you doing staring at a computer screen, reading my blog?
Me, I’m at the office throughout this slow, concluding week of the summer. But if I weren’t, if I had time off, I think I’d do what I haven’t done yet all year, even on the ostensible holidays I’ve taken: fall off the grid entirely and relax properly — without telephones, without text messages, without the Internet.
We don’t do that enough in the States and I sometimes regret it painfully. European readers know what I’m talking about. Just before the calendar turns to September, the cities empty out and the shops close in a kind of workers’ solidarity like no labor strike ever seen on American shores.
Servers Are People Too
Hell, this even applies to the online stores, as I noticed when I went to buy dress shirts from Asole & Bottoni, a not particularly fancy Italian clothier who happens to cut reasonably handsome, ready-to-wear shirts in just my awkwardly excessive sleeve length. Here’s the message I saw when I pointed my browser at their Web shop:
Amazing. Even the servers get to kick back in August over there. We’re doing something wrong.
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