No one fantasizes about getting laid off or losing his benefits. But getting furloughed? That's another story.

Dispensing time off without pay is fast becoming the corporate cost-cutting method du jour. The New York Times Co., Freedom Communications, and Pratt & Whitney are just a few of the companies that have recently notified workers that they'll be taking some unpaid vacation days this year, whether they like it or not, and numerous states and municipalities are taking the option as well.

In all these instances, the workers affected will make less money this year than they would otherwise. Yet a surprising number of fortunate, gainfully employed people say they wouldn't mind if the furlough fairy visited their companies.

It's furlough envy. And, hard as it may be to believe in this economy, it's alive and well.

"I'd do that in a heartbeat," one New York publishing executive said of unpaid time off. "I never get to take all the vacation that I'm allowed, so if somebody told me that I had to take vacation, I would love it."

Note the phrasing there: The mandatory nature of the furlough lies at the core of its appeal. Compared with workers in other countries, Americans are shockingly vacation-averse, and in parts of corporate America, letting it be known that you'd rather be on the beach is tantamount to career suicide. And with virtually every employer now handing out pink slips, that sort of peer pressure has only intensified. The fear is that being out of sight during vacation could quickly translate to being out of a job.

But when the time off comes in the form of forced companywide downtime, it mitigates the sort of anxiety that otherwise keeps people chained to their desks, says Ross Siegel, founder of the job-review site Jobulous.com. "People feel more than comfortable overall to get free vacation time even if it's unpaid," he says—provided, of course, that the loss of salary not cut too deeply into their paychecks. "People are happy to have it up to a certain point and not beyond."

Or maybe they just think they'd be happy to have it? Although surveys consistently show a willingness to trade money for time, Deborah Figart, an economics professor at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey who specializes in workload issues, says the workaholics who would benefit most from a furlough are exactly the people who are least likely to make use of one.

"The real high-fliers don't even take the vacation time they have coming," she says. "Do you honestly believe that those of us in management are not going to report to work anyway? We'll just be working for free. The expectation on management is going to be to show up, do your job anyway, don't get paid for it."

At the lower end of the job scale, she notes, furloughs are regressive in nature, disrupting the lives of those who live paycheck-to-paycheck. Indeed, furlough envy is experienced exclusively among those for whom a 5 percent pay cut would not be life-altering.

But talk to some furloughed workers, and it's hard not to feel at least a tiny bit envious. Pati Brown, who works for the state of California, planned to use her furloughed days to do things like paint her bedroom, get her car repaired, and have her hair done, she recently told the Courier-Post.

"I think it will be a mentally healthy thing, because you don't have a choice. You've got to take off," she says. "I'd like to predict that this may permanently alter the American work force once people adjust to the lower income."

Permanently? That might be a stretch, but one can dream.