Last year, my grandmother decided to take the whole family on a cruise. It was a generous offer, and not the first time she did it. (last time my whole family went to Alaska). They planned it very far ahead, and looked at January 2008 as the date to go to the next cruise.
My aunt helped to organize everything. Many months ago, she told me she needed to know if I was definitely going or not. At the time, I was looking for a new job, but it was impossible to tell what my situation would be like so far ahead of time. I figured I might as well say ‘yes’ and hope I could work it out (rather than say ‘no’ and miss the opportunity). Well, I am kind of eating my words.
Well, I got a new job, but the process is incredibly slow (applied in June, start in late October :o ). By the time I complete the mandatory 8-week training, it will already be mid-December. This means I’ll be officially working for less than a month before I’ll have to take this vacation. For starters it doesn’t look good and to even get the time off will take an enormous amount of luck (I’ll have to chain together my vacation with floater holidays and hope I end up with certain days off anyway) and even if I do pull it off I’m pretty much burning up all my vacation time at the beginning of the year. That, and I’m going to be under probation, and I don’t want to do anything (taking excessive time off, for example) that would jeopardize this job.
I might not be able to even do it, but not only that, given the downside (using up all the vacation up-front) as appealing as going on a FREE cruise with my family is, it might not be worth it to me. If I didn’t go, I could pick another week for my vacation, perhaps one that was a little easier to get, and not have to use up all my paid time off at once.
The toughest thing about this is that I’ll have to confront my aunt, and as lame as this sounds, I have a lot of anxiety about the impending guilt regarding my bailing out of the vacation. I’m probably making it out to be more than it is, but I’m honestly having trouble sleeping at night because of this! If I can’t go because I can’t chain the vacation time togeter/I’d get fired if I tried, then I could just say, ‘well, my hands are tied. Sorry!’ but of course I’d have to wait till practically the last minute (December) to really know that for sure. Argh! :mad: