Suppose for a moment that you had 415 million days of vacation. What would you do with them? Give ’em back, of course. At least that’s what American workers insist on doing this year, forgoing an average of about three vacation days per person, according to a survey from online travel service Expedia.com.

That’s a 50 percent increase from last year, according to the sampling of more than 2,000 adults nationwide, conducted for Expedia by Harris Interactive. And the number is particularly pathetic when you consider that Americans average only about 12 vacation days a year — far fewer than their counterparts in places like Australia and Western Europe.

People in the western United States are the nation’s workaholics, according to the survey. Not only do 56 percent work more than 40 hours a week, but 27 percent are forfeiting more than a week of vacation this year. The most common explanation, naturally: They have too much work, so they can’t afford to get away.

Even when Americans do take time off, a lot of them aren’t really getting away. Nearly one-third say they still check their office e-mail or voice mail.

Coping with bad bosses: Talk to any worker and you can get a tale about an incompetent boss. Some are just nasty, of course, but many are well-intentioned people who simply haven’t learned the nuances about how to manage others. There are all sorts of books on the subject, but many of the worst bosses feel overwhelmed to begin with, so they won’t take several more hours out of their workweek to pore over some book.

And, frankly, most books on management are a waste of time. For every great one I have found, I could list 50 that have more buzzwords than insight.

A new Web site might help them sort things out — and help their beleaguered employees cope with the situation. Badbossology.com has more practical advice than those sites where workers go to exchange tales about corporate stupidity.

It offers a lot of links to books and newspaper and magazine articles about how to cope with bosses who are either evil or simply don’t know what they’re doing. Included are such topics as negotiations, incompetence and harassment.

The site has a lot going for it, but I hope that it eventually will include more advice for well-intentioned bosses who might want to help themselves. Not only would that be useful for busy bosses, it could give unhappy workers information that they could forward to the boss — even anonymously.

I hope as the site matures that there will be more discussion of the books it features, so potential readers would have a way of cutting through the fog. It offers seven books on salary negotiation, for example, and each gets a favorable one-paragraph “review,” so potential readers have nothing to help them decide which book might suit their needs best.

Its list of books for bosses is particularly weak, focusing more on toxic problems than on the art of good managing. And because Badbossology.com gets a small commission for each link on its site that end up with the book being purchased on Amazon.com, it’s hard to tell whether the books listed are sincere recommendations or simply a way to make money.

All in all, though, it’s a good site. And it has the potential to be a great one.

In case you are a manager wanting good advice, try “First, Break All the Rules” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. And no, I don’t get a commission from them.

More Slinky: As an alert reader of this column pointed out, my recent excerpt on Swiss watchmakers from Hans Finzel’s book, “Change Is Like a Slinky,” ended with a paragraph that Finzel essentially took verbatim from “Future Edge,” a 1992 book by Joel Arthur Barker.

Finzel’s footnotes in the book had said that portions of the anecdote were “adapted from” Barker’s book, but Finzel replied in an e-mail that he had copied the item from some of his notes and mistakenly thought that he had already paraphrased what Barker had written.