(no subject)

[dragonlady7]

This is a reply to Eggplantia5's comment to my previous post, here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/dragonlady7/283335.html?replyto=435399
As has been the case for three weeks now, I still can't post comments.
Fabulous, no?
She linked to this article: http://abcnews.go.com/sections/business/US/vacation_030625.html
So, here's the comment:
"
I get comments. It's email I have trouble with. *sigh*
And replying to comments. I haven't been able to for weeks, reliably.
Oh well.
We'll see if this one goes through.

As for your article, it's so true.
We're overworked here at my co., but it's not even like me being here more days or more hours in a day would help. What our problem really is, is that the management structure is incomplete. I'm not effectively being told what to do, and so am being less productive than I could be if I knew what to do.
So...
I'm going to have to take some unpaid days. I've already taken unpaid days. I had to go to Buffalo for dave's dad's funeral; that cost me nearly $200 in missed time. And I have to go to San Diego with Dave, because I want to-- that will probably cost me closer to $400 in missed days.
I think they'll let me take the days, but it makes it awfully hard for me to make ends meet when I'm barely shaving by as it is. Especially when you add in how much the plane ticket is going to cost.
I despair of ever getting ahead. My student loans alone-- I owe more than my annual salary.
ARGH.
A vacation would surely help, and it's disgusting how much time the Europeans get-- my aunt in Norway has a month and a half accrued and no time to take it unless they hire her the assistant she needs. But she's considering just going anyway. And she could, and wouldn't lose her job. It's just expected. Mind you that's accrued after her usual annual 2-week vacation...
I'm horribly jealous.
I get 2 weeks... after a year. Next January I'll be eligible. The temptation is to schedule a holiday for then. But then... i'll be in the same position as I am now.
Dave really wants to go to the lake where his father died. When will we have time? Not this year, surely. Unless he wants to go alone.
Sigh... I don't do well with this 9-5 M-F Jan-Dec schedule.
"

Comments

[crakor.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I don't have much of a baseline though, but I've probably been pretty lucky. Mountainwave, being a small company, was pretty generous with paid leave (something like 5-6 weeks a year but that included holidays and sick days, so if you felt like working holidays you got extra vacation time)

Symantec does something along the same lines. While we have holidays pre-set so it's not part of our PTO so wtih that we get 3 weeks of PTO which has to cover sick days. not a bad deal overall. I think my favorite part of the deal is that it is from when you start Just every paycheck X number of hours are available for you to use.

But, that being said, we rarely have time to use it. I have 90 some hours accumulated that, except for next week, i won't use this year. But thats the pain of release schedules.

And ya I've been looking at financials School loans are a bitch. Over a 15 year period I'm going to end up paying back a 15k loan and pay ~16k in interest on top of it. Sucks large rocks as far as i'm concerned :-/

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I'm trying again to post a comment. sometimes it works from home.

We're a small company, too, and a small company of cheap bastards. If it sounds generous, they don't do it. For example, we don't get paid lunch breaks. We have to take them out of the middle of the day and work an extra half hour at the end. Miserly? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Galling? Yes.
So, it sucks.
We get 2 weeks of paid vacation a year. We have to request vacation time ahead of time.
We get 1 personal or sick day a month, which we can take at any time, either together with vacation, or separately.
That's great, if you never get sick or have a family emergency.
I blew through every one of mine and then some when Dave's dad died and I had to go to Buffalo. That cost me about $200... and now I want to go to San Diego this summer. Well... I have two days, one of which i have to take so i can go to a doctor's appointment.
It's maddening; I'll have to take an unpaid day to go see Dave's family out there. Oh well.
And I just can't bear to take a day just for sanity's sake, which I'd love to do. Because i'd spend the whole day thinking, if only I hadn't taken this day, i could've added it onto some cool trip we could've taken, which we won't now.
It sucks. I just want to have enough time to myself to think. But I don't have it, so I sit around at work doing nothing because i can't think. It costs them money, really.
Ah well. Too fuckin' bad. It's their loss too and I shouldn't worry.

[eggplantia5.livejournal.com]

i've never been effectively told what to do. we used to have an actual training system, but now it's whoever has time trains whoever's new. so basically we do our work by one large game of telephone. i spent the first 3 months of my job being completely and utterly bored and useless (as you may remember because i spent literally half the day im-ing you those days) and the only reason i actually got work to do was my immediate boss quit and they decided not to replace her. and it still took another year for me to get decently busy as i am now, but that is only because people are idiots (including myself) and i have to do everything in 3 different ways to get everything "closed down."

but i feel your pain, i do. your big boss sucks in a very dilbert-esque way and your supervisor could really be more helpful. just adopt this mantra- "it won't be forever, it won't be forever." it's really kind of scary how quickly a year does pass by, even though while you're in the year, it feels like eternity.

this is from kat

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, when I worked for tiny Spotlight Newspapers, we got one week of vacation after one year, and did not get holidays off -- though we did get "floating holidays" to use whenever we wanted, except that we could not use them on any Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, AND we had to do all the work we would ahve had to do if we had not gotten the day off. So that sucked.
But at the Gazette, although similarly you don't get the vacation (2 weeks) til you've been there a year, they let me take an unpaid vacation so that I could spend a week in Missouri at my family vacation. It will be my first vacation since I started working after college, just about 2 years ago. Yippee!!! Only one week to go!...sorry, I'm excited. Anyway, I think that for morale people should allow their employees to take their vacations after 6 months, or something....