While you were scarfing down the turkey, there may well have been thousands of Washington-area workers chained to their desks or stuck behind a cash register.
A veritable army of airline pilots and crew, Metro workers, repairmen and -women, waiters and chefs, cops, firefighters and paramedics, dispatchers, cashiers, and (alas) journalists drew the short straw Thursday and had to trudge to work while their friends and family hunkered down to fowl food and foul football.
“It’s not fun,” said Les Evans, union steward for some 2,600 Verizon workers, many of whom were required to work on Thanksgiving. “You show up to fix their phone and in the meantime, the folks that are there are having a good time.”
The Thanksgiving holiday is one of America’s biggest drinking holidays, and an increasing number of bars and restaurants are throwing open their doors to the public.
“They’re paying rent, whether it’s a holiday or not,” Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington leader Lynn Breaux said of restaurateurs. “A lot of people in Washington are busy-busy and they don’t have time to cook.”
Some workers tried to put on a stoic face.
“It’s the lay of the land,” said Harvey Richardson, a dispatcher at the Pentagon. “We could have taken leave. But somebody has to be here.”
Others actually claimed to be happy about the Thanksgiving shift.
“It’s the most fun holiday for us to work,” said Chelsea Yancho, general manager of 701 Restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue. Thanksgiving is one of the restaurant’s busiest days. “Everybody always comes in great spirits.”
Dr. Daniel Lieberman, a psychiatrist at George Washington University, said holiday work could actually have a paradoxical effect on people who might otherwise be victimized by holiday blues.
“Shared misery eases the load,” he said. “Sitting around with people going, ‘This really sucks’ — that’s better than sitting in an empty house.”
Most fun for Yancho is the elderly gentleman who comes in every Thanksgiving, handing out lottery scratch-off tickets to staff and customers and then disappears for 364 days.
“He’s sort of the Thanksgiving ambassador,” Yancho said of the mystery man.
Commuters will also have trains and buses to themselves as ridership shrinks to a fraction of a typical weekday.
Put your feet up: Metro’s Thanksgiving ridership:
» Thanksgiving 2008: Rail: 113,361; Bus: 99,781
» Thanksgiving 2007: Rail: 103,568; Bus: 97,986
» Average day in October 2009: Rail: 750,000; Bus: 438,754
Source: Metro
It’s not all fun and games, though. Police and fire officials remain ever vigilant on the holiday. In fact, the D.C. fire department sent an alert out a few days before Thanksgiving, imploring revelers to pull over for the beleaguered rescue vehicles trying to negotiate through holiday traffic. The short straws can also cause conflicts.
“The complaints we get usually involve favoritism, where you have management officials giving other management officials the same holidays off, again and again,” D.C. police union chairman Kris Baumann said. “Management doesn’t really have a coherent policy… [so] the rank and file are able to work it out.”
GW’s Lieberman said bosses have to tread carefully when they’re handing out holiday assignments.
“When people feel they’re being treated unfairly, it provokes a very strong emotional reaction,” he said. “When it happens in the context of a holiday like Thanksgiving where there’s association with family and friends, it has the potential to substantially amplify the feelings of being treated unfairly.”
Of course, there’s always something worse than working in your office on Thanksgiving.
Like, working in a store the day after Thanksgiving.
