Merry Christmas 2024

 Hello, anyone...  I do hope you had a good holiday.  I've been here, just dealing with ...  stuff.

A brief timeline of "lately"...  Early October of this year I took the week of my birthday off.  I'd been looking to use up at least two more weeks of vacation this year, as last year my vacation accrual was all messed up.  It kept loading up with more time than I had earned, I thought, when in late 2023, about mid December, I realized that I had used two weeks of vacation, but for some reason I had an extra week.  I was in the process of sending an email to our corporate HR department asking about the error when I thought to look at the manual, and read the part where employees accrue vacation at specific rates, and they change at the beginning of your anniversary year.

That is, when you are about to hit your fifth anniversary and change from accruing two weeks of vacation to three weeks of vacation each year, it starts accruing in January.  If you take all of it before you reach your anniversary date and leave the company, you get to pay it back.  So, feeling like an utter idiot, I sent a message to my boss, and asked her if there was a process where we could donate unused vacation we'd lose to a pool for sick employees, new family members, or anything like that.

My boss responded that we'd work something out.  Not something which I had expected, but it was very appreciated.  I was thinking of trying to find a way to use it when, in mid-August, my direct supervisor notified us on a Tuesday that Friday would be her last day.  She was retiring.  

And it occurred to me.  People who have worked their way into a senior role over twenty years in an organization as big as ours, retirements are usually either very long planned, or are part of a difficult choice.  I started looking over my shoulder, working a little harder, and polishing up the resume.  

Early October, the day after my daughter's birthday, I received something like seven text messages from coworkers.  The company had announced that our division was one of the company's divisions that had not done well, and the organization would be closed.  We were assured jobs into January of 2025, but there were other details that were still up in the air.  

As life went on there were multiple mandatory team calls, more details came out, and I was, honestly, shocked.  I've been through many different organizational changes, layoffs, reductions in force, whatever you call them.  But since they've let us know our jobs are ending, they've engaged outplacement consultants, hooked us up with internal resources to help us in finding new positions within the organization, and been very up front with our severance page arrangements.  

I've been laid off in some pretty horrid ways.  I won't bore you with the time a new supervisor told me to tell him the best parts of the job, and then using those parts he didn't like to fire me, or the time the organization decided to do a total reversal on a long-standing policy - and then it didn't work out.  Or the time the company's sole owner decided to end his life, and that was when we found out the company had not been paying certain taxes, like our unemployment taxes...\

So when I was notified that I had a firm end date, after which my severance package and all of my vacation would pay out, well, I was pretty surprised.  And then, when I was told my last "work day" would be a month early, no worries, I'd be getting my 40 hours paid every week until we hit that January date.  

So my world has once again my world has been turned on it's ear.  Here we go again....