‘But that's MY PTO’: Coworker keeps taking every holiday off using company PTO rules, refusing to trade, so colleagues team up against her, leaving her stuck working through all the breaks she claimed last year

I’ve been self-employed for most of my adult life, and that has advantages and disadvantages like anything else. But by the amount of time off-related stories popping up online, I pretty much know that managing your own time is one of the bigger perks of not being employed by other people, especially if those people have been inside the corporate world long enough to forget how real people outside the matrix live.  

Take one office where paid time off became a full-contact sport. The rule said only two people per team could take a vacation at once, on a first-come, first-served basis. Sounds fair until one employee decided to treat every major holiday like her territory. She claimed them all and wouldn’t trade even when parents tried to get Christmas off. It was pure calendar colonialism, filed neatly under policy compliance.