It takes me longer than it should to compose my “out of office” email messages at work. The text of the message itself is quite short; what’s hard is actually pressing the Send button. Intellectually, I know perfectly well that I am allowed and even encouraged to use vacation days. Emotionally, it feels like I’m playing hooky. A holiday, where everyone is out of the office, is so much different than a day where I am home and everyone else is laboring away under a fluorescent glare.

There’s no symmetry to this complex. When other people are out of the office while I am in, I don’t begrudge them their time off. Even if there’s something I needed from them, I don’t really mind; I usually have plenty of other tasks I can do instead. But I hate telling other people I’ll be gone.

I fear that the explanation is machismo: I would like everyone to work shorter hours than me, and for everyone to know it. Sitting high on my throne of hours I would gaze down indulgently at their so-called “effort” and reserve the right to judge it. Please note that this is hardly the case. I simply understand the desire very well.

One summer during college, working landscaping jobs to get money for the fall, I saw my supervisor in the grip of this same phenomenon. All of us showed up at the job site at 5:30 AM in order to avoid the summer heat, to work eight hours with a half-hour lunch break so that we could knock off at 2 PM when the heat became brutal. One day my supervisor let us all know that he had been obliged to arrive at 4 AM to accept the delivery of a load of pulverized rock, so that he was going to leave at noon. “When we break for lunch,” he warned us, “that’s when I break for the day. Noon. Noon and I’m outa here.” And so on.

We accepted this news benignly and wished him well. During lunch he remarked on how nice it was that he was staying no longer, that he would not have even lunched with us except that his meal had already been packed. We pronounced this state of affairs to be “cool,” that is, “fine with us.” But as we stood up to work he began to glance around like a hunted animal, and realized aloud that actually there was maybe 15 minutes worth of work that he should finish off so that it was done right.

After those 15 minutes another situation arose which he felt was delicate enough to require his attention, and so he continued to stay, working, complaining that he was supposed to be done at noon. We watched this spectacle unfold as quarter hour followed quarter hour and he remained, working and complaining. His second-in-command tried to help him leave, saying “I think we’ve got this now,” and “weren’t you supposed to be gone by noon?” in a gentle but concerned voice.

The poor man could not leave early. Nor did he. He finished at 2, like the rest of us. At the time I could not imagine what kept him at it. Now I can.