Furlough by another name would not smell as sweet

Here is a conversation that I had about 10 times during my furlough last week.

Neighbor/friend: “Beautiful day, eh? What are you doing home?”

Me: “I am on furlough.”

Neighbor/friend: “Sweet, dude. Good for you.”

The last line might have varied from one conversation to another, but whatever words they chose always meant the same thing: You are one lucky guy.

Everytime it happened I resisted the urge to tell them that I also had a $1,000 crown fall off of my tooth and a dental insurance plan that was going to cover about six cents worth of the bill. I figured if they were so happy for me that I was unemployed for a week, the tooth story might send them into a coma of euphoria.

I think there are a couple possibilities why people have the misguided notion that furloughs are good things. One is that many must have an image of furloughs that is rooted in movies made in the 1940s. I know I did before last week. You know the flicks: Sailors on furlough – played by Frank Sinatra or Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire - singing and dancing and boozing it up on the streets of a port town. Twenty-four hours of chasing women and getting into scuffles with the occasional Marines who had their eyes on the same skirts. Good times. So when I told people I was on “furlough,” what their brains heard was “fun romp.”

Another possibility – for those too young to have caught these movies but old enough to be among those still reading newspapers – is they’ve seen a story or headline that combines the words furlough and vacation into the sweet-sounding hybrid, “furcation.” Newspapers like to do this kind of thing. When the economy first tanked, we came up with “staycation” to describe drinking beer on your porch because you can’t afford the cost of traveling to Disneyland to tip a few with Pluto and Goofy. Get it? Stay-at-home vacation.

Newspapers introduced furcations when the economy tanked even more and furloughs became all the rage as companies across the nation started trying to maintain profits by mandating that workers take time off without pay. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090404/NEWS03/304049929/0/FRONTPAGE A furcation is a staycation without being able to afford the travel or beer. Which means it isn’t a vacation at all. It’s sitting on your porch without a job. And that really isn’t very sweet, dude.

I am suggesting a new hybrid for FUrlough from woRK – “furk.” It gets rid of the misleading “cation” and won’t conjure up the ghost of Fred Astaire when you tell someone why you are working in the garden rather than in your office.

Neighbor/friend: “Beautiful day, eh? Why are you at home?”

Me: “I got furked.”

That should make everything clear, don’t you think?