Vacation
I’m on vacation this week. I like to save my vacation for the end of the year, and so far, I’ve used only one day of vacation in 2012. That day was a couple of weeks ago, and I took it just so I could work more overtime the next week without exceeding the work hour limits. I’ve been working a lot of overtime, which is great for the paychecks, but tough to do. I’ve already worked more than 600 hours of overtime this year. I am actually working overtime on Friday night even though I’m on vacation (my regular schedule this week would have been dayshift).
Working 12-hour days is hard. It’s actually more than 12 hours, because I usually have to be there 30 minutes early for turnover, and I normally get there 25 minutes before that and stay 25 minutes late (since HR ruled in January that it’s ok for me to be there up to 30 minutes before and/or after my shift). Add the commute and I’m gone for about 14 hours per day. When I get home, I fix a quick dinner and eat it at the computer while I read my work e-mail and browse the condition report database (since I’m so busy at work that I don’t have time to do that stuff during the workday).
I’ve been really bad about keeping up with reading stuff online. That includes Live Journal as well as Facebook, Cracked.com, and other miscellaneous blogs. E-mail, too. I am so exhausted from work that even on my days off, all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch TV (I still don’t have cable, so that means Netflix DVDs or streaming video).
I wonder if I should rethink my strategy of saving my vacation until the end of the year. I always end up having problems with that because I like to know what my schedule is before I request vacation, but I never know my schedule very far in advance. Everyone likes to take vacations around the holidays, and we barely have enough people to cover all the shifts as it is, so only one person is allowed to take vacation at a time.
I get three weeks of vacation now, plus 32 hours of personal absence days. It’s a lot of time vacation to use (I know - nice problem to have). We used to be able to bank up to half of our vacation, but the company did away with that. We can now defer up to 2 weeks of vacation, but we have to use it the following year, so I still have 2 weeks of deferred vacation from last year in addition to my allotment for this year. I intend to defer 2 weeks of vacation to next year, but the company has been really wishy-washy on its policy about that. The past two years, they have just automatically applied my 80 hours of unused vacation to the next year’s allotment, but now they’re saying they will only allow us to defer vacation if we request vacation and the supervisor denies the request and sends HR a letter stating why the requested vacation was denied. I hate this bullshit - either we can defer it or we can’t, but they shouldn’t be deciding on a case-by-case basis.
This is a seriously boring post. Why the fuck am I writing about my company’s vacation policies? I intended this to be a short, quick post, but I seem to be incapable of doing that. Anyway, I promise the next post will have some slightly more juicy tidbits, if anyone is still reading.
Working 12-hour days is hard. It’s actually more than 12 hours, because I usually have to be there 30 minutes early for turnover, and I normally get there 25 minutes before that and stay 25 minutes late (since HR ruled in January that it’s ok for me to be there up to 30 minutes before and/or after my shift). Add the commute and I’m gone for about 14 hours per day. When I get home, I fix a quick dinner and eat it at the computer while I read my work e-mail and browse the condition report database (since I’m so busy at work that I don’t have time to do that stuff during the workday).
I’ve been really bad about keeping up with reading stuff online. That includes Live Journal as well as Facebook, Cracked.com, and other miscellaneous blogs. E-mail, too. I am so exhausted from work that even on my days off, all I want to do is sit on the couch and watch TV (I still don’t have cable, so that means Netflix DVDs or streaming video).
I wonder if I should rethink my strategy of saving my vacation until the end of the year. I always end up having problems with that because I like to know what my schedule is before I request vacation, but I never know my schedule very far in advance. Everyone likes to take vacations around the holidays, and we barely have enough people to cover all the shifts as it is, so only one person is allowed to take vacation at a time.
I get three weeks of vacation now, plus 32 hours of personal absence days. It’s a lot of time vacation to use (I know - nice problem to have). We used to be able to bank up to half of our vacation, but the company did away with that. We can now defer up to 2 weeks of vacation, but we have to use it the following year, so I still have 2 weeks of deferred vacation from last year in addition to my allotment for this year. I intend to defer 2 weeks of vacation to next year, but the company has been really wishy-washy on its policy about that. The past two years, they have just automatically applied my 80 hours of unused vacation to the next year’s allotment, but now they’re saying they will only allow us to defer vacation if we request vacation and the supervisor denies the request and sends HR a letter stating why the requested vacation was denied. I hate this bullshit - either we can defer it or we can’t, but they shouldn’t be deciding on a case-by-case basis.
This is a seriously boring post. Why the fuck am I writing about my company’s vacation policies? I intended this to be a short, quick post, but I seem to be incapable of doing that. Anyway, I promise the next post will have some slightly more juicy tidbits, if anyone is still reading.