So my co-worker is in the military reserves and when they have training, it’s solely my job to cover them in addition to my normal work. While I don’t know much about how military reserve schedules are made and training works, I’ve always heard the expression, “one weekend a month, two weeks a year”.
My gripe here is that those weekends always consist of a Friday off work. I believe last year it came out to 9 Fridays total. I thought these were weekends? When the two weeks rolls around, it’s my job to do both jobs. My boss doesn’t seem to know the exact dates either (to my knowledge) and they aren’t logged into our absence system as days off for training or whatever. They just put up their OOF, and nobody seems to bat an eye.
It’s probably petty to gripe about it here, but do I have any recourse or leverage for how these things are scheduled? When all these days add up, we’re talking roughly a months worth of work I’ll be covering for them in addition to their allotted vacation. These are days I have to plan to be at work and cannot take vacation on. While it’s not the end of the world and hasn’t posed a large issue yet, it’s starting to wear on me inside and I know I’ll need to address it soon.
Should I talk to my coworker first? Or my boss? Or am I just being an asshole and should suck it up? Not really sure what to think.