Since 17th October till 21st October , we have the biggest cultural / religious festival in kolkata / west bengal - DURGA PUJA. During this 5 day period most of the offices , shops, institutions and even banks and government departments remain closed and everyone spends a nice little holiday. Writing about Durga Puja / Dushera in detail would be totally beyond the scope of this blog and you can learn more about it from the Wikipedia link or just by typing it in Google.

However , explaining it to clients / employers is an important task , one should not forget. The American’s have the 4th of july / memorial day , the British have their Christmas / New Years day and many others have their own customary holidays , hence everyone more or less understands even if you have got some unfinished project during this time , but nevertheless it does not harm taking preparations for such a extended break if you have got a steady inflow of web designing / programming / outsourced web development work. Some of the measures one should take are :

• Start mentioning about it casually to your regular clients and request the break
• Surely you would not be able to chat with all your clients , so a email to all your existing clients or more specifically the one with current projects would help - explaining the reason and the time duration
• If you have an active Elance or Guru profile , it would also be better if you change your screen identity to reflect your on Vacation Status - i put myself as “myname - on vacation till 22nd october ” . Yes , it does look odd and unprofessional but hey , i am actually helping them .
• And of course there is the Vacation mail setting , on your email account - almost all ISP’s or hosting providers , allow you to create a vacation mail - which might be something like “Thank you for emailing me , I / We are on vacation till date MM/DD/YY . For emergencies , call Mr.Y at xxx xxx xxxx “
• If the previous points  were for what to do prior to the vacation , there are also things one should prepare for after the vacation - such as how to handle the backlog afterwards i.e when you return to work .  A chart / list of works that needs to be resumed based on priority, would be a good thing to start with . This will help making the life easier and with less tension of “oh there’s so much to do , who to tackle first “
• I don’t know about you but i am a computeholic hence my PC gets little or no rest or and even in office there’s hardly any chance for the computers to go on maintenance mode . So , thinking that way , this would be a good time to put the computers up for maintenance - things like running scandisk , anti-virus , defragment , disk cleanup , hardware check … basically the works.
• buy postcards … if you are going on a trip and remember to put up a gallery on flickr after you return and blog it or send the link to your friends , clients even… get them interested in your culture . Since postcards are almost a lost tradition , especially with the new photo sharing websites coming up , if you have a digital camera , that might be good too.

Saying all this , if you are working on with very high valued clients, or customers who deserve some respect , you surely should not leave email accounts totally unattended … what with the rise of broadband , Gmail , Blackberry be sure to check once during the night - even if you don’t reply fully , it will make you feel good knowing that you have got some Puja Greetings back from that satisfied customer , whom you emailed about the request for leave.