A few tidbits:
-I'm in a team of 15-20 guys, half of us have off sunday & monday, the other half friday & saturday. -This means mon-thurs we have a full staff, friday-monday is half staffed
-friday is normally fairly slow as it's friday and clients tend to wait until monday, many don't even know we work weekends and are surprised when they do call in and someone shows up that day
-mondays are considered our busy days due to being half staffed for the previous 3 days + clients calling in issues at the start of the week.
-you work holidays if you would normally work that day of hte week. This means the sunday/monday crew works almost every holiday since most fall on a monday, while the friday/saturday crew get to be off. We get paid basic 8 + 1.5 holiday pay for working them, the guys that are off get +8 of regular hour pay and have the day off.
So my job has very generous off time. I currently get 20 days paid vacation, 5 sick days and 2 float holidays every year. It doens't roll over and we cant cash days out so if you don't use them for the year they're just wasted and gone. This being the first job to give me paid off time means I'm not used to it and thus I've wasted a few days every year.
I decided this year I'd change that and created a plan to use all my off time through the year. I don't like taking extended full weeks off because it really messe my motivation up when I have to go back to work, so I decided to just spread the days through the year and give myself 4 day work weeks pretty much every other week while avoiding holiday weeks (we have to work holidays and taking off on those weeks can mess up our extra pay)
Anyway, I submitted my requested off time for jan/feb and it was fine. I just submitted for march/april and today I get a call from my supervisor.
“Hey I just wanted to mess with you a little bit, you seem to not like Mondays, huh?”
“I'm not sure yet but I think there's a policy about making patterns for off time. You're alright for now and I went ahead and approved the days but I wanted to warn you I think it's against company policy”
“try and move the days around more in the future”
This is just stupid to me.
Yes mondays are our busy days, but the basic rules for scheduling off time is you need to give 2 weeks notice (rarely inforced), only 2 team members can schedule off per day and it's a first come first serve basis. If a tech schedules off for a monday there's no issue and nothing gets said, so why's it a problem if I'm giving you far more advanced notice and no one else is trying to take the days off?
I'd get it if other teammates had an issue because they want a monday off but it's filled because I hogged them all and another tech already beat them to it, but that's not happening. The team also has a good history of techs talking to each other and making trade offs with our scheduled off time if someone needs it. No one is getting screwed and no one is getting upset.
Also if you haven't even verified this “no patterns” rule is a thing yet, why are you contacting me about it?