Burning up those vacation days.

Two years ago, the smallish, specialized, fairly anonymous technology company I work for was gobbled up by a company for which those descriptors can no longer be used.  I went from working with about 650 colleagues, to working with 300,000.  As the assimilation process continues, one of the casualties is the generous vacation policy of my ‘legacy’ employer.  Previously, we could carry over something crazy like 160 hours. Since I’ve been working here for almost nine years, I was earning four weeks per year. The problem is that I could never seem to take a full four weeks off; vacation would accrue faster than I could use it. So each year I’ve been carrying over 140+ hours of vacation. Until now. The new company policy is no carryover allowed at all. To be fair, we are being weaned off of our old plan, and will be allowed to carry 80 hours into 2009. Any more than that will be paid out in January, up to a max payout of 80 hours. Which brings me to the title of this post. I have 183 hours in the bank. I need to get that down to 160 before December 31st.  A few hundred of my co-workers are in the same boat. Needless to say, not a lot of work is going to get done over the next couple of weeks.  The silver lining, of course, is that I will get what essentially amounts to an extra paycheck in January…which I plan to spend on something that will be the topic of a forthcoming post.