Imagine putting in a vacation request at work, but only part of your vacation request is approved.

Would you accept that and cut your vacation short, or would you take a closer look at the rules and make them work to your advantage?

In this story, one call center employee is in this situation, and her manager’s advice about what to do gives her an idea that her manager didn’t see coming.

Check out the full story.

Don’t want to approve my PTO? Might as well take what I have coming…

Another post reminded me of a call center job I had. I put in for a week of PTO the minute the quarter opened up for PTO requests.

I’d prewritten the email, there was maybe 20 seconds between the “PTO for quarter 2 is available” email landing in my inbox and me hitting send.

3 of the days were denied, the other 2 approved.

Cool, regardless I was going to be out of state on vacation, so I went to my manager and asked what I should do.

This wasn’t going to work.

She wanted me to call in on those days.

I told her I was flat out not going to do that, because since I was travelling several time zones away, I wasn’t going to wake up to call in in the middle of the night.

So she saw reason (good manager who knew I was one of the top performers in the entire call center who made her team look good otherwise), and I didn’t need to call in, but it was still going to count as one of my “occurrences” as an “unplanned” absence.

Now, mind you, these were limited to 6 per year.

No need to rush back!

It didn’t matter if it was one day or a week, from the day you left to the day you returned, it counted as 1.

So, since I was already taking an occurrence by being on my trip, I decided to take an extra couple days when I got back to adjust back to the time zone and run a few needed errands.

There was no real fallout.

She knew what she had to do!

My manager admitted when I went back that I gamed their weird policy and that she hoped I had a great vacation.

The only slight consequence was when I took another trip the following winter to my in-laws and got snowed in, she was flummoxed because the system didn’t have a code for “snowed in” because we were in south TX and that wasn’t a thing there.

Good manager, she knew how to get out of my way.

She has moved on.

I eventually left the job to move several states away.

Shame they didn’t offer long distance WFH back then. (They do now, but I’ve moved into an entirely different industry.)

It sounds like she had a very understanding manager.

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user shares how their call center operated.

This user also has a horrible call center experience!

This user thinks it is insane that they didn’t have any policy for weather related issues.

This user had a very cool manager!

This user knows how some policies work.

Her manager really had her back.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.