I work as a cook in a kitchen that is not typical. The arrangement is like this: there are two cooks, the restaurant is closed every Monday and we each get 2 days per week off (never on weekends). In my country we get 22 paid vacation days (legally they are called “recreation day off”) and in my work it's a huge issue if we ask for a day during the weekend. There's this cleaning lady (“Jane”) who knows how the kitchen works and helps us a lot, I don't know what we would do without her. When we request a day off, usually another cleaning lady comes in and Jane helps in the kitchen.
So, I'm about to quit. And I asked for a day off on Saturday because I have a trial for a new restaurant I applied to. It's super important to me but I obviously can't explain to anyone yet why it's important. And no cleaning lady can come on Saturday, we only have Jane, which means the other cook would be left alone in the kitchen.
And the thing is, they didn't clearly say 'no' to me! Which is frustrating! My manager made me go to the cleaning ladies and see if someone could cover for me. At first I was told 'sure, yeah', but then something came up. And I was informed by one of the ladies that they couldn't work on Saturday and my manager said nothing to me. This has happened so many times before, they say it's up to me to decide if it's a really good idea to take that particular day off and I should think about it better and it's just so obviously psychological pressure to make me say I won't, after all, take a Saturday off and they can say that it was my decision and they didn't actually tell me 'no'.
And I know that it's the company's fault that the other cook is gonna get fucked on Saturday if I'm not there, but I just can't bring myself to push for the day off knowing that. This is one of the many reasons I want to quit actually.