Life in Germany is hard, so Germans don’t have the energy to work as much as Americans. Even German professionals punch the clock to track their time spent at work down to the minute. The concept of flex time is nearly universal in Germany as is the constant complaining by every German employee that they have so many overtime hours that they don’t know how to get rid of. It is such a burden to them knowing that they are needed by their employers yet owed more time off, because their 30 days of vacation and multitude of holidays a year just aren’t enough, when they work a little longer on the few days a year that they actually go to the office.
When the stress of trying to take care of their own leisure time needs and work place demands simultaneously gets to be too much, Germans go to a doctor to get prescribed a six week Kur, a sort of health spa retreat, where they can enjoy the benefit of having their health insurance pay for the all-inclusive resort, and their employer paying them their full salary for learning horseback riding and cooking. The best part for Germans is that these count as sick days and don’t take away any of their thirty days of vacation.
Germans are delicate and need lots of time to erholen, to sort of rejuvenate, and they need at least one vacation a year with 3 consecutive weeks to properly recoup. This is best done in a sunny place like Greece, Turkey, Spain, or Portugal. In America we tell each other to have fun on vacation, Germans command each other to erholen themselves well.
Germans don’t make very many babies, but the ones who do are well rewarded for leaving their employers in a precarious position. Whether they are male or female, Germans can take maternity or paternity leave for up to three years and their employers must hold a place for them, so they can waltz back into corporate life right where they left off. These poor workers can still complain though that they unfairly have to start back where they left off, having missed out on 3 years of raises and promotion opportunities.
Germans plan their illnesses
The Germans love planning and punctuality, and they tend to scoff at our play-it-by-ear methods as juvenile, a side effect of our cowboy mentality. Germans don’t value spotaneity, they value everything running as planned. If you are ever waiting for a train in Germany and notice that it is over one minute late, you will hear at least one German denouncing the Deutsche Bahn as unreliable, despite the fact that it manages a 20,000 mile network of rail road carrying five million passengers each day with stunning efficiency. The Germans love planning so much that they even plan out their illnesses.
If you work with Germans and try to contact one who is missing from work due to an illness, his boss will tell you that he is sick until next Thursday. That’s because Germans go back to work when their doctor schedules them to be well again.
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