Perfect Present May Be A Day Off Some Spend Months Scheming To Have Their Vacation Today

Some offer bribes such as Cougar tickets. Others simply beg.

Any ploy is fair play in the Spokane Fire Department’s annual scrimmage to get Christmas Day off.

For months, firefighters flashed their pleas across agency computer screens inside the city’s 14 fire stations.

One frantic colleague offered to buy firefighter Rick Carlson’s lunch for half of 1996 in exchange for covering his Christmas shift.

Carlson passed. He wants dinner with his family today - even if he has to wear a beeper and pray it doesn’t squawk.

The week between Christmas and New Year’s is the most coveted vacation and family time of the year, and often the grist for savage inner-office clashes to see who gets it.

A worker at Pfaltzgraff’s was so bent on getting this time off she made it a condition of her getting hired at the busy Factory Outlets store in Post Falls.

She’s now at Disneyland. “Some employees don’t think that’s fair,” admitted Laura Carnie, store supervisor.

The winter holidays also split the region’s personality like no other time of the year.

On its bustling side, restaurants, taverns and movie theaters overflow with festive throngs as swamped retailers hustle to serve shoppers wielding gift certificates and exchanging presents.

Elsewhere, it gets almost ear-plug quiet as legions of workers take the week off. There are no public meetings at Spokane and Coeur d’Alene city halls. Secretaries are sent home as offices survive on answering machines and beepers.

Getting days off during the holidays often takes seniority and savvy, say personnel directors. Many workers reserve their freedom more than a year in advance, as soon as the vacation calendar surfaces.

At Kaiser Mead, where the pot lines never cool, workers already are jockeying for vacation slots for next year’s Christmas and Christmas Eve.

But many aluminum workers also volunteered to work the holiday shifts, seduced by the juicy 150 percent jump in hourly wages - which lifts an entry level worker from $12.50 to $30 an hour.

This week is a potential jackpot for others, too.

The 20 erotic dancers working Christmas Day at DejaVu in the Valley expect to profit off the holiday generosity.

“They’re going to be here because they can make some money,” said John Deyoe, manager. “And shoot, they don’t have anything else going on.”

How much can a dancer make on a good Christmas shift?

“Frankly sir, I have seen them walk out of here with over a thousand dollars.”

Cabdrivers also look forward to New Year’s Eve and its abundance of inebriated big tippers. “Nobody wants it off,” said Valerie Twardzik, at Spokane’s Yellow Cab.

But in most quarters, this week is a time to escape the office.

Most manufacturing and construction schedules slow to a halt. Jimbo’s Seamless Raingutters has closed its offices until office manager Kelly Griffin returns from Las Vegas and Palm Springs.

Bob Cooper, director of Spokane’s Economic Development Council, said many businesses use the sluggish time to gear up for the next year and stockpile supplies.

At Winston & Cashatt, the firm’s 23 attorneys are getting trained on the Windows 95 computer program. “We picked this week because most of the attorneys are not in trial,” said Frank Neeri, the firm’s legal administrator.

Unless there’s a snowstorm or other emergency, most government offices will be comatose - except for police who will likely be responding to the grim, but predictable seasonal increase of wife and child beatings.

Coeur d’Alene Mayor Al Hassell said he expects the only real bustle this week at City Hall will be in licensing departments as people scramble to renew their occupational licenses before they expire on Jan. 1.

Spokane County Commissioner Steve Hasson said he’ll be working this week, and is prepared to contact absent workers.

“I’ve got all their home phones, cellular numbers and secret numbers,” he said. “I’ll call them when I need something.”

Carlson, the Spokane firefighter who passed on the free lunch bribes, indicated his marriage would benefit from a quiet holiday.

“My wife would rather I didn’t wear the pager,” he said. “She knows it’s going to go off during dinner.”

, DataTimes