Rod and Karen discuss The Cosby show, Lil Duval, Electoral college drama, Foxy Brown coming to TV, half of Americans don’t use their vacation days, SC fighting porn, interior department finalizes waterway protection rule, man can’t divorce his wife, booby prank, clown prank goes wrong, teacher threatens black kids, man fakes hate crime, black teen pregnancy is down and white people news.
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Hi Karen & Rod! Thank you so much for speaking on this. I use all of my PTO days each year, but sometimes I roll over some for next year. As my PTO is accrued over the course of the year, it’s easier to quickly plan a trip on budget airfare deals that pop up online from websites like this one: http://www.theflightdeal.com. Budget flight deals have made it so much easier to see parts of the world I thought were too expensive, all for the price of flying within the US.
I work remote from where ever my laptop can get reliable Wi-Fi, so it’s been difficult to maintain a work-life balance when you can be “on” all day and you get emails from colleagues from all over the world and made me less inclined to take time off. By using my vacation days, I realized that I wouldn’t lose my job while I was gone, which helped me work less hours and eventually re-commit and enjoy my job. Now I look forward to opportunities to take time off and use my flexible work status to try new things, especially since I’m not tied to an office.
I really want to do more trips in 2016 as a remote employee with more control over my time. Fingers crossed one of these trips is being able to see both of you at Awesome-Con next year!
do more trips in 2017** (sorry for the typo!)
Apologies in advance, this is a long comment
A tale of two jobs:
When i was in business school I was an intern turned kinda full-time hire working in supply chain for a designer clothing company in North Carolina. I was working 40+ hours plus school but was still contracted through a temp agency so they wouldn’t have to pay me benefits. So when the holidays rolled around I couldn’t afford to take off cuz i didn’t have PTO. So i’d be sitting in an empty ass office pretty much by myself for like 2 weeks. And since our time clock required an eye scan and fingerprint I couldn’t just clock in without being at work. It was miserable.
Fast forward to my current job. When i started my team was only like 20% American so niggas would go back home to various Asian countries for like a month or 6 weeks at a time. Sometimes multiple times a year. Our vacation day allotment is rather generous but ain’t nobody got THAT many vacation days. Turns out, the manager, who is Indian, wasn’t requiring them to use vacation days for these trips. So one cat left for another company and got paid out 2 months salary in vacation days! So HR asks the boss about the unused vacation days. So now all of a sudden we gotta request time off, except he was only making the Americans do that. For the international ppl they would just request a week off and “work remotely” for the other 5 weeks. And they always seemed to have internet issues that prevented them from working while away.
So i peep game and call out the hypocrisy. Manager tries to bring up something I did wrong in front of everybody else. He says i “work from home too much”. So i did a work from home email search and documented how often everybody else works from home compared to me. I was the 2nd least by 1 day.
So now when i go on vacation I only use sick days (we get 10 per year) so i can keep my vacation allotment maxed out so I can get a nice parting gift if and when i decide to leave the company. Gotta finesse the system since they’re tryna play games.
And of course my teammate just went to China for 6 weeks, “working remotely”.
“Fuck Corporate!” in my Phonte voice
My time off just kicked in at the beginning of this month since I was a mid year hire but you best believe I took AWL of the vacation time I could. Ain’t no work Christmas/New Years week bih.
Yall. That fake hate crime had me dying laughing! That was just sad. Definitely agree and appreciate the discussion on vacation days, I agree 100%. Love the show
Hey Rod and Karen! I agree with you both 150 percent: take your vacation people! For me, I love some stay-in-my-apartment vacations. These vacations cost nothing extra and require little to no planning. I already pay a hell of a lot of money for rent, cable, online streaming subscriptions, wifi, this furniture, these bed sheets and those video games to not use them. Why not maximize the output in these investments by spending some quality time rejuvenating yourself indoors? I know that introverts out there feel me!
Also, I’ve found that the work and money I put into having a so-called ‘fancy trip’ sometimes tend to outweigh the relaxation output I end up receiving. I’ve come back from trips out of town more exhausted than when I left for the vacation in the first place. That just seems counterproductive in my opinion. Anyhow, that’s just me but, as a society, we should not be ashamed to just take some time off, no matter if it is to sit at a park all day for a few days, just feeding pigeons. Do what you love. Life is too short!