Back to the

Well, I'm not sure what best to call it at this point. One of my coworkers calls it the loony bin sometimes, and it could be the grind, or the hellhole, or even the place where I work that allows me to pay my rent. Anyway, back there for a day.

I need to stop taking time extended out of the office, because it seems like every time I do, they make some ridiculous change to the PTO policy. After the last one (cutting down carryover hours from eighty to forty), they decided that, for this year only, we can't carry over any hours of PTO. To prevent people from rushing to take another five or so days off before the end of the year, they've decided to pay those hours back to us next year. It's a little complex when you first look at it, but basically, if you had twenty hours to carry over, you would lose it all, but get twenty six extra hours (basically, those hours with interest) next year, to be spread out over the course of the year. In this example, you'd get an extra hour of PTO every paycheck. For the people who are planning vacations or time off early in the year (for which they would need those carry over hours) they are allowing us to go two weeks in the hole. Basically, we can take eighty hours of vacation before we've accrued that many hours and just "pay it back" as we accrue it. It's kind of an underhanded way of cutting costs, but it's much better than laying off more people. And, with patience, we will come out with a little extra in hours.

And, after this news, I'm off another day. I'm not going to rescind any of the days I've already taken in light of this new temporary policy change, mostly because I've already set plans for them. Things on the PTO front are annoying, but they'll work out.