As a father, when you are expecting a new baby, you want to be able to stay home for a while to take care of the little one and your wife.

What would you do if your employer said that you couldn’t take a week off when your baby was born because they were short-staffed?

That is what happened to the new dad in this story, so he told his boss that he would be taking paid FMLA paternity time, which the manager could not deny.

Check it out.

Fine then, I’ll just take paternity leave…

Many years ago, I was a Sales Manager for the now defunct Circuit City.

My wife and I were expecting our first child.

This was in 1999.

My wife was leaving her place of employment as she was planning on staying home with our daughter once she was born.

Being our first child, I wanted to be home for a little while at the beginning.

As I was talking to my store manager to arrange having some time off when my daughter was born, I asked for a week off.

This sounds like a staffing problem.

I was met with opposition and told I could only have 2 days off, because “we don’t have extra management coverage.”

(Yet we some how cover peoples vacations).

This was absolutely ridiculous and luckily I had done my homework.

The way the FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) law is written, the parents can take up to 12 weeks of Maternity/Paternity leave, and their job is guaranteed to be waiting for them when they return.

I believe this is meant to be combined between the parents, but since my wife was leaving her job permanently and not taking Maternity leave, that left 12 weeks available for me to take.

Paternity leave is a lot more common these days.

Paternity Leave is rarely ever done, because it is most often unpaid leave.

I, however, had plenty of PTO saved up (Vacation and Sick Time).

So, I informed the Store Manager that I would be filing for Paternity leave under FMLA and would in fact be taking 12 weeks off and would be using my saved PTO to cover my income.

He tried to argue with me, but I told him, he should probably go contact HR.

He knew he had messed up.

He returned later that day and sheepishly asked me if I would accept the week I originally asked for?

I told him that I would accept 2 weeks or 12 and that the choice was his.

I ended up with 2 weeks and that Store Manager learned that, though I was young (at the time), I wasn’t going to be pushed around, and that reasonable requests should be reasonably accepted.

Well played, but honestly, he should have taken the full 12 weeks. No reason not to.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this.

That would be amazing.

Exactly, managers should be better people.

This is good to know.

Yeah, that is not enough time with a new baby.

This person quit over something similar.

Managers think they have all the power, but not in this story.

He knew his rights, and the only thing that would have made it better is if he had taken the full 12 weeks off.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.