I think there's 2 things that are especially true for technical people that cause people to worry about taking vacation time (where you are completely disconnected) that are almost polar opposite.
Firstly there is a worry about if your co-workers are competent enough to do take care of your time critical work in your absence, they may believe that they are but that is not necessarily true.
As an anecdote, I took a couple of days off a while ago. At the time I was away an urgent issue came up which required a small reconfiguration on the server.
Not wanting to bother me a co-worker attempted to resolve this himself. Unfortunately he did this in a rather hamfisted way by overriding a lot of stuff he didn't understand that I had done for security reasons.
Result, I come back to an inbox full of complaints about email no longer working. After some probeing I find that our server IP address is on several blacklists for sending spam. I then discover that the server has a rootkit on it.
This means that I have to work a large number of extra hours correcting this problem which more than nullifies the time I got off for vacation.
The result of this is that I actually feel less stressed on vacation if I have a smartphone for my work email with me and know that people don't worry about contacting me.
The other opposite problem is that perhaps your co-workers are competent and can take over your duties with no hiccup to the organisation, now suddenly you are stressed that management might not think that you justify your salary so well.
Firstly there is a worry about if your co-workers are competent enough to do take care of your time critical work in your absence, they may believe that they are but that is not necessarily true.
As an anecdote, I took a couple of days off a while ago. At the time I was away an urgent issue came up which required a small reconfiguration on the server.
Not wanting to bother me a co-worker attempted to resolve this himself. Unfortunately he did this in a rather hamfisted way by overriding a lot of stuff he didn't understand that I had done for security reasons.
Result, I come back to an inbox full of complaints about email no longer working. After some probeing I find that our server IP address is on several blacklists for sending spam. I then discover that the server has a rootkit on it. This means that I have to work a large number of extra hours correcting this problem which more than nullifies the time I got off for vacation.
The result of this is that I actually feel less stressed on vacation if I have a smartphone for my work email with me and know that people don't worry about contacting me.
The other opposite problem is that perhaps your co-workers are competent and can take over your duties with no hiccup to the organisation, now suddenly you are stressed that management might not think that you justify your salary so well.