Schedule go boom

[bktheirregular]

I get 22 days of leave from work in a calendar year. My normal annual schedule involves taking two weeks at Christmas and New Year's to see my family, then one or one-and-a-half weeks in the summer, working around bank holidays so there are a few more days in the event of illness and the like.

Needless to say, I did not account for two and a half weeks in New York watching out for a brother recovering from rather serious orthopedic surgery. That kind of blew up my vacation schedule.

Unfortunately, I'd gotten my Christmas tickets to New York in March - you have to buy that far ahead to get decent prices. Oh, and those tickets are probably not refundable.

Oh, and I can't get an advance on vacation days from next year, either, according to the accounting office. Oh, and I can't even take a day off for illness unless I get a doctor's note. And not just any doctor, either, but a doctor from IKA, the national health service.

No good deed goes unpunished, right?

Comments

[weirdweb.livejournal.com]

Oh, that really sucks. Now I'm really glad I came up when you were in New York, but still. They don't do anything like leave without pay, do they?

(Of course, I have a budget for having to go without pay for at least a week in case Congress ever does fail badly enough to actually furlough us. I know that's not an option for everyone.)

[bktheirregular]

No, our pay is calculated on an annual basis, and paid monthly. (And yeah, it turned out to be a good thing you swung by when you did. And greatly appreciated. Not that I was exactly on vacation for those two weeks, mind.)

It's one of those odd things that doesn't get understood much outside Greece, actually. One of the points of controversy is that "people get 14 months' salary instead of 12, the greedy bastards"; actually, they just divide the annual salary by 14 instead of 12 when they pay at the beginning of each month, and you get 1 1/2 months' pay at Easter, 1 1/2 in July to help pay for summer vacation, and two months' pay in December for Christmas. But it's all based on the annual salary.

So the only issue is, will they let me take four days of 2012 leave in the last week of 2011? I don't have any answers yet. But there's a month to go.