Christmas season

I love this time of year. I am especially excited because we actually get to travel to Utah this year to spend time with family over the holidays. Thank goodness. My work didn't make it easy. In years past, my work has blocked out the dates from December 15 until sometime early in January and said that no one could request time of during those dates. Thus we have spent the last 2 Christmases here in Philly. Don't get me wrong. It hasn't been horrible. The first year, we went to New York just a couple days before Christmas, made up our own walking tour of the different department stores so we could check out their holiday windows and indoor decor, and we saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. It was so much fun. We stayed in a really ghetto hostel for the night and came home on Christmas Eve. We were able to do some skyping with family on Christmas. Last year, Zack's family came to us, and we really had a great time hosting them and enjoying family time on our own turf. But this year, when I found out they weren't blacking out the dates around the holidays, I just knew I had to try for some time off.

I went to the staffing lady who would be handling the holiday scheduling several months ago and discussed this with her. I asked her what restrictions there would be (basically none), when I would know if I had been granted the time off, etc. Then I went for it. I put in a request. I put it in nice and early and hunkered down for the long wait until November 11, the date that she said I would know if I got the time off or not. After a while, it became abundantly clear that the prices of plane tickets were just going to go up and up so we took a gamble and went ahead and bought our tickets for the time I had requested off.

November 11th, I stopped into the staffing office to hear about my schedule and was told that they didn't know yet and that they needed more time. Imagine that.

Finally, 3 weeks later, the finalized schedule was posted. I had requested several days off in a row, and they had granted me the first part of my request, but scheduled me to work for the 3 days at the tail end of my planned trip.

As you can imagine, I was pretty livid. I had specifically discussed with staffing my need to know in advance if I wasn't going to get the vacation time since it takes more than just a couple of weeks to arrange for cross-country plane tickets, especially around the holidays. They had promised me a certain date and then just pushed it back and pushed it back until it was a mere 3 weeks until I was supposed to travel, and then they didn't grant me the time. It wasn't so much about not getting the entire time I had requested. That would've been okay if they had just informed me sooner. I marched my behind down to the staffing office and made my case, but they basically just told me that there was nothing they could do. They didn't care about the promises they had made and broken and the inconvenience they had caused me. After cooling down for a day or 2 though, I worked out a trade with one of my coworkers for one of the days, got a pool nurse to cover for me the 2nd of the 3 days, and was able to switch one of my days off for the 3rd day. It took some real work and several days to figure all that out, but I got it done and now I get to take my vacation free and clear. And I don't have to pay $500+ to change my plane ticket. Phew. So in 9 days, we're headed off the Utah to spend some of this delightful holiday season with our families.