Be Excellent To Each Other

Been in St Lucia for the last 2 weeks, had a great time, then you get home and find

1. The ponds have all drained, even though in any other 2 week period this never happens, fish are OK thankfully
2. The automatic watering I spent hours setting up to keep all the peppers and tomatoes in the greenhouse alive failed, this one is my fault I should have put a jubilee clip on the offending week link in the house pipe run.
3. The kitten is fat and is ignoring me after 2 weeks of eating and no exercise at the Cat holiday home.

Must say I’m quite tired after getting no sleep on the plane home, so maybe things will be brighter tomorrow

Your pets are fine, you can buy vegetables in shops and you have just been in St Lucia for two weeks. I'd probably cheer the fuck up if I were you.

On the plus side, you can afford a holiday abroad. And pets.

Yes you are both right, I think that some sleep is needed

What did you buy us all?

When we got back from our recent US holiday our dog had put on a lot of weight, and was begging around the dinner table (actually, we sit on the floor and eat at the coffee table in front of the telly, but it's pretty much the same thing, right?). The friend that was house&dog sitting for us denied any wrongdoing....

Also, much of my lawn had died.

But I had a fucking ace time on holiday, so really it didn't matter much.

Did you bring back sweets for the rest of us?

The fat dog ate them.

And you'll get on a plane.

I've spent my days off on the M5. No holidays for us. Stupid work and 6.5 days per quarter contract. Which is all getting used over Xmastide.

Do you only have that quarter to take the days off? I like that idea.

As they are only giving me three month contracts because of restructure, yes.

Why? That's pretty restrictive.

Means you don't end up working six months straight without a break though.

Not necessarily, at our place if you don't use 'em you loose 'em.

Only if you don't use them within that year though, surely?

Exactly, I think Grim... means that he likes it as it is better for employers but worse for their staff.

I figured he just meant it helps to remind you to take some time off regularly

Yes.

And don't call me Surely.

I have my brain and apathy towards work to do that though.

I used to do that... when I was 8

I saw someone do that on Come Dine with Me a few months back.

One of the big insurers has a holiday policy which forces you to use at least one week, in a minimum five day block, in each quarter. In some cases it works well as it forces the break, and it also encourages two week holidays (by tying final week of Q1 in to first week of Q2). Also, management are prohibited from overriding that requirement. However, fucker if you are getting married etc as there is no carry over flexibility at all. I think thats reasonable from an HR perspective as they actually give more than legal entitlement. They've also put some clever tweaks in to ensure that not everyone is off at the same time.

It's quite handy here, in that we shut for Christmas and a week in June so you have to take at least a week every six months.

I have a problem with finding a convenient time to take holidays, working on our current contract. I had three days off in August and regretted it massively because it was insanely busy. I now have ten days left to use by December 21st and I'm struggling to see what I'm going to do with them that won't cost a fortune or leave me feeling that I should've just stayed at work.

Next year, my sister is getting married in fucking France and that'll be only the third time we've ever taken the boys abroad. Holidays are an expensive luxury

My place gives us 25 days a year, to use as we see fit. In theory it should be a bit of a nightmare as I work for a consultancy, but generally work on site for clients, so I have to keep them both happy. In practice it makes booking holiday extremely simple, as whoever you talk to it's always the fault of the other guy if it is at a tricky time

My place is ok with holidays, you can carry over 5 days each year (10 if you manager approves it)

Anymore left over and you will loose it.

We also have a flexible benefits scheme which among other things allows you to buy or sell 5 days each year. If you do this they either pay or deduct the cost of 5 days holiday from you pay each month.

Before we were taken over by a Belgium company you used to have to ask HR for more than 2 weeks off at at time, now as the Belgium’s get 37 days plus bank holidays they just take most of August or July off so nobody gives a shit about long holidays anymore

It's 26 days a year where I am at present, but restrictions on that there has to be two people of the team I'm in there (which is shit, as it is a team of three) and some other things involving next year's figures and the like. I'm not overly enamored with it but, hey, work.

Nah, it's better for everyone. It stops people needing to take the whole of December off because they forgot about their holidays, for example.

I can perhaps see problems around the ends and beginning of the periods as people try to get two weeks off, but that's not hard to deal with.

You know what is hard to deal with?
"Can I have xth - xth of x off, please?"
"Er, no, actually. We've got some project at the start of the week, and the other people are also off then and the week after. You can have the week before?"
"But I've already booked my holiday!"
"WTFF?"

Who the fuck forgets to take their holidays?

Lunatics.

25 days plus 11.5 bank holidays plus any toil we accrue. You'd think I'd never be there.

What about someone who wants a longer holiday?

Also surely it just means that there will be three more occasions throughout the year when people may end up having to use up their leave.

It would be better to manage leave with some intelligence and put something in place to monitor how many days are left in the year and how many leave days are remaining for the team and then send out reminders to people when certain conditions arise.

I didn't realise until recently that you earn holidays whilst on maternity leave AND our HR department give bank holidays on top.

So, someone who's maternity leave is up at the beginning of November and has got 35 days holiday to take before the end of the holiday year on December 31st. It's bananas.

Better four small lumps than all in one big lump, though.


You'd think, but people here still manage to have weeks left over by December.

Or you could do what my place does, which has an online system that you can log into to see how much holiday you have left and book accordingly. But then find out that the online system is fed info manually by someone, and they haven't had time to do it properly, so the numbers are wrong and you can't have all the days you booked after looking at what you had left, as you will have gone over your 25 days.

Idiots.

I used to keep a record myself, but then they brought in this system, so I stopped keeping my own list as it was unnecessary...

Ha ha.

I offered to do something for ours where you book your own holiday and then a manager has to approve it. They said no thanks because apparently we have to have signatures on leave sheets. For fucking holidays even though most of the legally significant documentation produced throughout the rest of the organisation has no signatures

Ours is just a database we use to get approval, and which automatically logs how many days used and how many left.

At one previous place the secretary just used to log it on paper and feed it into a system occasionally. She then left, without logging the previous three months. I got lots of bonus holiday that year.

I managed to get an extra week off at the last place I worked because they hadn't done the paperwork properly and they eventually forgot.

Mine is the other way round, the timesheet system records all the holiday properly, and that is used internally for everything. It's the external facing aspect of showing how much holiday you have left that is a broken manual process.

I had to go back through every timesheet manually to count up to fix it, which was a fun morning.

We have a system, that loads your quota in, and chips it down as you request it.

We use Basecamp for tracking that stuff, though I haven't looked into it properly yet. But I get 25 days plus bank holidays, so that's pretty good going.

The last place was a shambles. You had to ask HR how many days you had left, then wait about a fortnight for them to bother getting back to you*, and they wanted a month's notice just to take a day off. Fortunately my manager would approve any requests as long as you weren't taking the piss. And then I ended up three days over when I left, so had my pay docked. Rubbish.


*are all HR departments utterly incompetent?

Not always, but they have to hide the fact that they are flexible and actually care about people rather than processes, or they get sacked, in my experience.

It's bad, I know. We used to make a real effort to switch the telly off and eat at the table, but have been really lazy of late and stopped bothering. I sit on the floor so as not to spill anything on the sofa. It's a bit daft as the dining table gets little use unless we have friends over.

The dining table is square, with 8 seats. The middle part can fold away, making the table smaller, but then only 6 seats would fit around it and we would have to find somewhere for the other two. What a potential nightmare. The wood is dark brown, and the chairs are padded, covered with brown 'leather look' material.

The sofa is L-shaped, and a light beige colour.

Fucking basecampers. You ruin your game and surely it's not challenging or fun for you?

"Leaving a job, Fridays are probably the best day to be a final day, aren't they?"

"Yeah, suppose they are. As then at least people might come and have a drink after work and there's not that much more of a rush, and you can sign the last of things off, which book ends it nicely."

"Oh, yeah, totally."

"Yeah, they are the best day for all concerned."

"Wonderful, in which case, I'll take the 24th December off. And the 27th, 28th and 31st, meaning my last working day will be the 21st on this contract. Which is a friday. Best for all concerned, no doubt"

That's that sorted, then. Save paperwork.

20 days + bank holidays every year. Holiday year runs from January to December.

So far I've used 1.5 days of the 20.

25 + Bank holidays for me.

Mine run from Jan to Dec too, I use mine though.

Got 8 days left to use some for the Oct half term and Christmas holidays.

Snap

I got the power!

This year, 31 + Bank Holidays.

Of which I've used about 8.

I'm not doing this right, am I?

My holidays run from March to March

A pain in the arse when the moved it from the normal Jan-Dec