So, I got a nice little e-mail yesterday from the section administrator… I’m over the maximum number of allowable vacation hours. Unfortunately, around these parts vacation is a ‘use it or lose it’ commodity. My wife and I have honeymoon plans for this summer which should clip a couple weeks off my total, but until then I need to start taking at least two vacation days every month, just to keep even with the rate at which I’m accumulating it.
Yeah, yeah… I know. It’s tough being me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m hardly complaining about the situation, I’m just trying to figure out how to schedule things around my co-workers. My boss, for example, is in the same boat. For the longest time it was just the two of us in the office, so we’d take short vacations so that the other person wouldn’t get overwhelmed. This means that we’ve both built up close to eight solid weeks of vacation over the past few years.
When we hired WorkKevin as the third person in the office, it helped a lot, but we still haven’t quite gotten into the habit of taking breaks. That’s going to have to change now.. After all, losing paid vacation time is almost like losing actual money.
So far, I’m going to be taking tomorrow off and doing a Mon-Weds-Fri week, and my boss is going to take the whole week after that off to spend Winter Break with his kids.
His kids haven’t been told about this yet, of course. He could e-mail or phone them to fill them in, but he says he wants to be there to see the excited (or at least surprised) looks on their faces and hear them say “But Da-ad… It’s supposed to be our vacation!”
Unfortunately, it’s not a great time for either of us to take time off. One of the reasons it’s been light ‘blogging from me lately because it’s been getting busier here at work. And it looks like it’s going to get busier. One of our occasional competitors is closing their local office and the folks that used to go there are starting to discover that we exist.