When you want to miss the party

The other day Jean wrote about the different ways to put foreign holidays on your calendar. That’s great advice, and I’ve already subscribed to the calendars for the countries I deal with most frequently.

Sometimes, though, that’s not enough. It’s particularly important to communicate with your colleagues, wherever they are, about local mores and customs, because those will also impact the holiday schedule. For example, here in Philadelphia, our “regional” holidays pretty much match the usual US holidays, so no great difficulty there. If you try to do business with businesses further north and west in Pennsylvania on the first day of deer season, however, you’re not likely to reach anyone unless you’re standing in a field with antlers and covered with brown fur. I wouldn’t recommend it.

Obviously, if that’s a problem within a single US state, it can also be a problem in many if not all of the countries across the world. At one point I was asked to join a large law firm on a business trip over to the cities of Cologne and Wuppertal. The trip was scheduled for March, and we were to begin our work in Cologne, where we’d spend a few days before moving on to Wuppertal. There’s only one problem – our arrival in Cologne happened to correspond with Rose Monday, the date of the traditional Karneval parade which completely envelopes Cologne in a rush of drinking and festivities. Even if we’d gotten where we were going, there’d have been no one there to let us in.

Luckily, I’d spent enough time in the area to realize this, and after consulting with our colleagues we started in Wuppertal, where the parade takes place on Sunday rather than Monday. By the time we arrived in Cologne on Wednesday most of the hangovers had worn off, and we had a very productive three days of work.

The moral? Whether you’re planning a phone conference or a trip, it’s always best to get local input early.

image from worldeventsguide.com