China's "Working Weekends"

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Here in China, we just had 7 days off (October 1-7) for 国庆节 (guó qìng jié), Chinese National Day. (Like the Fourth of July, but for China.)

And that means that today, Saturday, October 10, I went to work.

This is the phenomenon of China's "working weekends." It means if you get a bunch of days off for a holiday, sometimes you have to come in and work on Saturday or Sunday a week later. (Here is the schedule of public holidays and working weekends for 2015.)

I'm pretty sure the math always works out so you get a net positive amount of days off.

When I first heard about "working weekends" I thought, that's ridiculous and inhumane. But, from another perspective, if they're only going to give you, say, 4 extra days off for a certain holiday, in addition to normal weekends, a lot of people would prefer if some of those weekend days were swapped around so they could get more days off consecutively, right?

So, eh, whatever. It's not a big deal. Just a quirk of Chinese culture.