As with all things, it's about trade-offs. As much as I dislike this company for its policies towards time off and butts-in-seats[0], I am not on-call and am never obligated to answer my phone outside of work, no one bats an eye at me taking a few hours to make an appointment every now and then, I don't hate my manager or coworkers, and generally little is expected of me which suits me fine because I haven't found IT work fulfilling for at least 5 years.

[0] Which is directly responsible for infecting my household with COVID. Literally everyone in the company has had it.

As they wrote, barbaric.

Ahhh....the plantation still lives.

He was literally talking about how it was his choice to stay, and you're calling him a slave. Over only getting half a day off on Christmas Eve, which is not even a holiday. I honestly cannot tell what is sarcasm anymore.

Christmas eve is usually a work day for the vast majority of the world, even the out-of-touch white collar minority. We benefit from the fact that (a) the work is easy, (b) not much of it gets done and (c) you go home 1/2 way through the day. You sound even more out of touch than the rest of us if you think this is "barbaric".

Is this unusual? A quick google search shows Trump issued an executive order just last year to give the day off to federal employees, but Wikipedia doesn't list it as a federal holiday.