Imagine working for a company where they decide that nobody can take vacations days in November or December.

If you had been planning on taking time off over the holidays, what would you do?

Would you accept the fact that you had to work or come up with a sneaky workaround?

In this story, an employee was in this situation, and he decided to use his vacation days in October.

But then he did something sneaky to get back at his company.

You will love what he does next!

Won’t approve PTO during the holidays? good thing we have personal days…

So the company I worked for previously used to give us a set number of vacation days (12) and a set number of personal days (10).

Vacation days were obviously for vacations and planning; but it was made clear to us that personal days were essentially sick days: they weren’t for planning… more like you wake up sick and have to call out.

This is where it gets tricky…

Fine, whatever…the only problem with the personal days, is unlike vacation days, they would not roll over and you couldn’t get paid for them.

If you didn’t use them, you lost them.

Now here’s an important piece of information.

He knew he had to find his way around it…

HR policy prohibited managers from requesting doctors notes or even asking what you were taking a personal day for.

The only time that changed is if you were requesting something like short term disability or something.

So I’m working and like most people don’t make holiday plans too far out in advance. I saved up some PTO to use at the end of the year but not enough to take like both thanksgiving and Christmas.

That’s INSANE!

Then end of September comes around and management publishes a bulletin to the effect of “too many people requesting off…no PTO will be approved for all of November or December.”

Now obviously this didn’t go well with the department.

60 people on the team…many of which saved days to take around the holiday. And now we would either have to use our days in October or roll them over (max of 3 days)

It gets interesting…

Knowing the managers, I elected to use my days in october…no guarantee I would get to roll them over and use them.

And you might be thinking…ahh this is the malicious compliance….everybody took off in October.

Oh no my friends…you have forgotten about the personal days…which yours truly, as a healthy 25 year old, has in spades. 6 left to be exact.

Now cue malicious compliance.

He knew what to do!

Thanksgiving comes around, and I’m enjoying the holiday…but I think I ate too much.

Unfortunately, I’m goons have to call out black Friday… errr I mean today. I’m definitely NOT going shopping.

I call out the next Friday as well.

And the Friday after that.

Finally the cherry on top!

And the next as well.

At this point you can see a trend….my manager did too. calls me into her office to ask what’s up?

Obviously I play dumb. And she finally comes out and says “you’re calling out every Friday… why?”

“Personal days” I tell her.

“And this has nothing to do with your holiday PTO being rejected?” she asks.

That’s SWEET!

“Nope. I have accrued personal days and as of late, I really need them.”

There wasn’t a damn thing she could do, and the beautiful part was I wasn’t the only person doing it.

The company changed the PTO policy not long after.

YIKES! That sounds fun!

How did the company not see that coming?

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

This user has a funny comeback for the boss’s question.

This user knows how to use days off.

This user has a great reference for this story.

This user shared what happened with their brother.

This user hates working on a Friday!

Someone knows how to fight the system!

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.