Policy, schmolicy

I just had a post typed out, and Blogger ate it. Man, I hate it when that happens. It's been months and months and months since it has; I thought I was safe!

Anyhoo... yesterday my company joined the 21st century by announcing the creation of a new maternity leave benefit top-up program. Good news for many but man, the timing is lousy for me; because I don't think they intend to pay it out retroactively, and when I took two years off to be home with my kids when they were babies, I got ZIP. Every other mother I met on my maternity leave seemed to be amazed at this because it seemed their employers universally threw them some kind of a bone in this regard. (Working at a utility, where the company's costs always get passed on to the ratepayers, the argument has always been that 'excessive' benefits would be hard to get the ratepayers to cough up for. Looks like times are a-changing.)

So it's too late for me to take advantage of that, but I am going to the mattresses with management over my vacation schedule. The one benefit I did get during my maternity leave was my 2007 vacation entitlement, so when I came back to work on March 31 of this year, I had 4 weeks of 2008 vacation plus 4 weeks of 2007 vacation plus 6 personal days to use up... and even after taking two weeks off at Christmas plus a couple more days here and there before year end... I will still have 9.5 days left that I want to carry forward into 2009. Normally, company policy is that you can only carry 1 week forward, and that it must be used up sometime during first quarter of the new year. I foresee many January and February days spent cradling my childrens' chins over barf buckets, so I don't expect that there will be any problem with that.