Due to my five-year anniversary with LuthorCorp this March, and due to a little nifty in our benefits package that allows us to buy or sell a week’s vacation, I have four weeks of vacation this year. This dovetails nicely with my shiny new Egg Board fellowship at WCDH, which is tentatively scheduled for June 15.
I had expected to hear plenty of grumbling from LuthorCorp about taking all this time off at once. I expected a discussion of who is going to cover for me while I’m out, and why we can’t afford a temp. I expected to get a stern lecture about what a burden I was placing on everybody, and how we are not Funky Little Company anymore; we are a big public Fortune 500 company and the rules are different now. What I did not expect to hear was no.
No, we can’t spare you. No, you can’t take all of your earned vacation at once. No. No. No.
Fortunately, I have three things working in my favor. One is that I had the presence of mind to push back, even though it meant exchanging the only harsh words I’ve ever exchanged with my boss. Another is that my sweet and wondrous co-workers within earshot have vowed to help me in any way they can. The third is that we had this conversation just minutes after I had done a really big favor for another salesman and his multimillion-dollar customer.
I am supposed to meet with my boss’s boss today, who has the final say, and who is both a good guy and an old friend (he recruited me into this company and before I came to work for him he wrote me a reference letter for a scholarship when I was in culinary school). It is for this reason only that I am merely rattled, and not depressed. But since we have 8 inches of brand-new snow on the ground—9 if you count what we’re supposed to get this morning—whether he even makes it into the office today is anybody’s guess.
To quote my friend Johnette, I’m gonna have a drink and walk around, I’ve got a lot to think about, oh yeah.