That’s not a cure. That’s stop-gap treatment at best.
Violence is always the answer, son. Your old man wasn’t out killing gooks in Vietnam so some pencil-necked, pocket-protector-wearing sissy could tell you when to take your vacation.
I may get really slammed for this but the whole “family comes first” crapola really makes me see red. :mad: They made their choice to have a family, I made my choice not to have rugrats, and yet I still have to suffer? The girl who got pregnant in my last office got every other Friday off, no questions asked. All because she got knocked up. So none of us could get Fridays off. I wanted to go to the boss and say, “So if I get pregnant, can I get free days off? Well, seeing as my SO is completely non-interested, could you oblige?”
Asshole.
I worked at a home center as an assistant manager, and had asked for some vacation time. I was told that I could not have the time off, as it was too busy. (It was always “too busy”- inventory, spring, Christmas, etc.)
A couple of weeks later, the boss calls me into his office and tells me that my co-worker (also an assistant manager) had been given the exact two weeks off I had been turned down for, because “he needs some time off right now.” :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Assholes. I quit that job.
I dunno. I hate children myself, but I guess it’s hard for me to feel that no concessions should be made to parenthood. I’m not sure about getting a day off every two weeks (WTF for? It’s not clear to me why an expectant mother would need that anyway.) But it seems to me it’s simply impossible to raise kids without impacting on anyone else at all - temper tantrums, needing to run out of the office to pick up a sick kid at home, and yeah, probably getting a little bit of preferential treatment if needed to get time off to see your kid’s French horn recital. (And besides, at least they’re not off doing something pleasant . . . .)
Which is not to say that I think the examples cited in this thread are fair. But I think, of necessity, families do need a bit of extra accommodation sometimes. I think it’s better than, say, expecting breastfeeding mothers to somehow disappear when the baby gets hungry in public, or the (thankfully no longer legal) habit of expecting career women to give up their jobs totally if they got pregnant.
It’s not something that should be abused. But even if I think people really shouldn’t be reproducing as much as they are, I’m not sure I agree that no concessions should be made to parents at all.
I don’t think concessions shouldn’t be allowed for family and I certainly am understanding if your kid is hurt or sick or whatever…I am talking about taking time off for leisure things. You know, I have five vacation days and Mommy Dearest has five vacation days and even if I schedule my day first and she abruptly needs it she gets it…even if it’s not an emergency.
As for “Caryn” - her real name, what do I care if she reads this? She had a doctor’s appointment every two weeks. So she would take the whole day off to go to the doctor. Was she at the doctor for all 8 hours? Nope. We asked her straight out.
But then this was also the girl who told us loudly and clearly that she had stopped taking her birth control pills without telling her Italian boyfriend in the hopes that she would get knocked up and his very Catholic family would then put pressure on him to marry her ass.
Yeah, that’s definitely not cool. If a vacation is already scheduled, and you want yours, then you gotta either negotiate with the person yourself (and accept no for an answer if that’s what they say) or else make different plans.
Ahh. I’m afraid there’s no treatment for such an advanced case of dumbcuntery, save the one I mentioned earlier.
The bad part is imagining how her children are going to end up.
She also told us:
Every day, in the morning, she would think about which of us customer service drones she would pick a fight with that day.
That she cheated on her boyfriend to get revenge.
That she was His, with a capital H, and he was Hers. And so he wasn’t “allowed” to do all kinds of things.
Keep in mind, he worked in the warehouse. Any day any of us could have marched back there and said, “Hey Rocky*? Rock? You know that girl up there you call your Rose? Do you know what trash she’s been talking?”
She eventually got fired for stealing and then attempted to bring a court case against the company for firing her while she was preggers.
*Yes, that really was his name. His last name was LaRock, so he went by Rocky.
Where do people like that come from? When I meet someone like that, I just have to wonder. I mean, what makes a person act like that? It’s not only that they’re tremendously unpleasant to be around and make other people’s lives hell - they make their own lives hell too. Trapping someone who doesn’t want to marry her into marriage? Stealing and getting fired from work? As the kiddies say, OMGWTFBYOB?!?!
That kind of fucktardery is so incomprehensible to me, because there’s nothing to be gained from it. I mean, I understand people who screw others over for their own benefit (though I’m not fond of them). What’s the point of making yourself and everyone else miserable?
Hmm, I’m sure where you’re going with this line of thinking. You see, my father was stationed in Georgia. And that was in the 50s.
I wouldn’t think of hitting Trevor with a baseball bat. I did, however, have fantasies of taking him sailing. You know, two go out, one comes back. There’s something satisfying about thinking of holding his head in the Charles River until he stops twitching.
As far as concessions to the Mommie Coallition go, I’m for them. But I want the same perks that they get. I should not be penalized because I remembered to wear a condom.
Seems like someone who needs to join Trevor in the Charles. I wonder if Rocky would be willing to help.
AFAIK, Rocky is now [del]trapped[/del] wedded in matrimonial bliss. So that means…he may be doubly anxious to help out.
I also forgot. She was a smoker, and used her breaks for smoking. No big deal…except she would routinely light up right as her break was ending, then continue to smoke over the length of her break. Did I mention we were in customer service? So only one person could take a break at a time, and hers always went over. Also lunches.
She also smoked while pregnant, which in my book is an unforgivable sin.
She made fun of another girl in customer service who was being abused by her husband.
Basically, before she came, us three customer service reps were a tight-knit group, who got along really well, loved our job, and liked the company. For a job like that, you must like each other because everything is so dependent on the other’s schedules - one person taking breaks/lunches at a time, etc.
She came along and made us miserable. We were taking close to 100 calls a day, and the few minutes a day we got to chat with each other she would bitch.
Man, she really burned me I guess, since I haven’t forgotten any of her little traits. But now I think of it more as an interesting story to tell than anything else.
I meant “continue to smoke past the end of her break”, of course.
One of my mentors told me a story about when he worked for a large bank. It was generally treating him badly money wise and the prior year’s vacation they had forced him to cancel and not take, while his do-nothing boss took the same weeks off. He had non-refundable plane tickets.
So he started looking for another job. It took him a while but he found one just as the bank started to go though a conversion in May. His do-nothing boss, who had personally screwed him out of his vacation the year before, was bragging about how she was taking the whole family to Disney at the end of May. So he waits until the day before he was to start with the new job, which happened to be a week before her Disney vacation. He walks into HR’s office and resigns on the spot, and tells them that they can use the two weeks vacation that they screwed him out of the year before as his ‘notice’.
He walks back to his desk and starts boxing up his stuff when ‘do nothing boss’ gets her tidy heiny summoned to the presidents office. Evidently, there were lots of loud "But…You Can’t Do That"s coming from behind the closed door after that. When she came out, he told me she looked like she was beaten and defeated. That’s when he smiled and waved ‘bye’ as he handed in his ID and headed out to his car in the parking lot.
Moral of the story: Don’t Fuck With Peoples Vacations.
Yeah, I got your meaning. She sounds like a real piece of work, that one. I wonder if she had a substance abuse problem. People who do often like to create chaos around themselves.
I don’t want to turn this into yet another smoking debate, but I view smoking and mommyhood much the same way. I smoke, and expect to take the occasional break to do so. At the same time, I fully expect you to take breaks as well, and will gladly cover for you.
But I Just. Don’t. Get. This. Boss says “You can’t take vacation.” Employee holds up two tickets, non-refundable. Can the boss then say, “If you don’t stay, I’ll fire you?” That’s really OK?
I don’t really care if the boss is willing to reimburse you. Unless all hell has broken loose and it really is a REAL emergency, then they really shouldn’t be allowed to do this.
As the extremely pro-marriage-and-family person I am… I just want to offer you a hearty “Hear hear.” Choosing not to have a family is just as valid a choice as choosing to have a family, and there is no reason why single people should be treated as second-class citizens. It happens far too often.
Happened to me as well.
I had scheduled a day off well in advance so my dad and I could check out some personal care homes for him.
He had Parkinson’s and was not capable of driving himself.
The very day before he was due to fly in, my boss informed me that I would have to cancel because he wanted his daughter to attend a conference.
It wasn’t anything very special either-a trade show about a product that we never sold.
They suggested that my SO drive him around as he was self-employed-no matter that if the SO didn’t work, he also didn’t make any money.
To top it off, at the end of the day, his wife (yes it was a family owned business) came up to me and complained that I had been rather silent that day.
She couldn’t bitch about my not doing my job because I had fufilled all my duties-I had just failed to “whistle while I worked.”
I informed her that although I was forced to accept their decision, I thought it was extremely unfair and I wasn’t going to fake being happy about it.
I ended up getting the day off, they made my life a living hell, and six months later, I went over to a different company and took all my accounts with me.
I heard later that the boss was bitching that I had personally taken over $150,000.00 dollars in profits out of his pocket.
Good.
Thank you all for this validation. Not that “Mommie” was wrong for wanting to get out early for “ballet”. But at least once in a while, it should have been my turn, too. Hell, there was 4 or us, so even one day in eight would have been OK. But noooooo, “mommie-dom solidarity” always won out. :mad:
Say no more, as soon as I saw “Fort Campbell”, I was convinced of your story. I did a year at Campbell myself, and you couldn’t ask for a crappier, more shit-festooned duty station anywhere that didn’t involve being shot at in anger.
We had soldiers in 2 ID Korea bending over backwards to extend their tour to get out of being assigned to Campbell. You know that spells major suckage!
Yep. That sounds about right!
Depends on the state. In At Will States, the boss can fire you because you sneezed wrong, he sneezed wrong, or he had a bad day. There is almost zero protection against a bad boss in an At Will State.