I'm on PTO

I'm on PTO.

Can we move this?

That was the entire email I sent when a metrics meeting landed in the middle of a trip that had existed before I joined Wahoo.

I had warned my boss about it. I was taking Thursday off, would be checking in less, and hoped to stop at the Boulder office on Friday or Monday. The automatic reply said I would be out until Wednesday and available in a limited capacity.

Limited was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Before leaving, I was thinking pretty hard about buying a small Boston Whaler for the Hudson. I wanted something compact enough to dock easily and stable enough to visit the towns along the river. I grew up around Lake Michigan and had done some sailing since, but I was honest with the seller that I was looking for a small, fun, manageable way back onto the water.

I asked about the mild current, doing a little fishing, and whether the outboard had an upgrade path. This is what relaxing before vacation looked like: researching how much boat was enough boat.

I said I would give it one final think after work.

Then Amanda, Eva, and I went to Colorado.

The camera roll is much better evidence of PTO than the inbox. Amanda and I rode bikes past an enormous aircraft parked beside the road. Eva moved between the couch, our arms, and a travel bag that she appeared to consider her personal seat. There were mountains, rocks, and a little actual space around the day.

There are also photos of me on the couch with a laptop and Eva. That is a more accurate picture of the middle ground. I was away. I was not entirely unavailable.

Wahoo had just publicly announced its new Sports Science Center in Boulder. I stopped there Monday. The facility had a testing lab, strength room, cycling studio, and a large Wahooligan wall covered in athlete photographs. Visiting a sports-science lab during vacation barely counts as work if you are excited enough about the lab.

The inbox did not fully agree.

One logo change still got a reply from me: “I did the black on black. In NYC we just want all black errr thang.” Apply production files kept moving. The out-of-office response kept telling everybody else that I was checking email only in a limited capacity.

PTO ended with another plane. The return started before sunrise at LaGuardia. By Thursday the camera roll had me in the Atlanta office wearing a Wahoo jersey.

I also offered to buy cheap pizza for whichever of my teams won an employee-survey completion contest. Cheap because it was coming out of my pocket and I am, as I explained in the email, “well .... cheap.”