Last year, I took my wife’s advice and, for the first time in more than a decade, I accepted an employee position. The logic for this career move was impeccable: I get paid insurance, paid holidays, something akin to job security, and paid time off. It was the last item that presented me with something of a quandary: What to do with 15 vacation days and three floating holidays?

In the 10 years I was a consultant, it seems I had grown used to vacation resembling Patton‘s little jaunt through Europe — you get in and out as quickly as possible. But now I’m presented with the luxury of time and (with the kids in school and my wife working) no place to go. I suppose that I could do things around the house, but that isn’t much of a vacation. Suddenly an idea struck me: I needed to apply logic to this question, so I asked myself (as often is the case when logic is involved), “What would Spock do?”

The answer struck me at once: Spock would watch Star Trek! This brought up the question of how much Star Trek. So with a little research, I created this table:

Click the image to enlarge.

It wouldn’t be seemly to ignore the movies, so I created a second table:

Click the image to enlarge.

The grand total for all the episodes and movies comes out to 23 days 1 hour 21 minutes.

Now, let’s see: I have 15 vacation days plus three floating holidays, which is a total of 18 days. Add three weekends (or six more days) since the vacation would be contiguous, and the total is 24 days. However, if I delay my vacation so that Thanksgiving weekend is included, the total is up to 26 days. Yeah, that’ll work, but I can’t seem to get past the feeling that I’m missing something.

——————————————————————————–

What’s the geekiest way you’ve ever spent a vacation? What is your dream geek vacation? Share your experiences and thoughts in the discussion.