I started a new job in March of this year. It’s a specialist (non-urgent/ADL maintenance treatments only) medical clinic front office position at an assisted living/memory care facility. The company has hundreds of clinics all over the US, and three in my state. I’m the only front office employee for two of the clinics, and typically when I need time off, the FO for the third clinic will handle anything that comes up for my clinics and vice versa.
I live very far away from both my husband’s family and my family. Mine is 8 hours away by plane, his is a 12 hour drive away. I have a lot of PTO saved, and requested Tues-Fri the week between Christmas and New Years off so we can travel to spend time with my husband’s family. We haven’t seen them since last year and are doing Thanksgiving by ourselves, so Christmas is the only time everyone can get together with everyone else’s work schedules.
The other FO also has family that are a plane ride away, and was planning to take that same week off to visit them. Our manager (who lives a 10-minute drive from her family) said that she can only partially approve both of our requests, and based on seniority, he will get 3 days that week and I will get 1 approved.
We explained why that won’t work, whoever works Tuesday might as well just work all week since travel wouldn’t be possible as Christmas is a Monday. We offered to take turns working remotely (half a day each day) instead. Manager said that absolutely no remote work will be allowed, despite the fact that I’m already remote from at least one of my clinics every day and it isn’t an issue. The job can absolutely be done remotely. We were told to “work it out” between the two of us. It’s really awkward because we have a friendly working relationship and don’t want to ruin the holidays for each other, but family is very important to both of us. My husband’s family is literally just his mom, his sibling, and us, so our absence will be very missed. It’s also the first Christmas since his grandma passed, so it’ll be even harder on his mom if we can’t be there.
I’m frustrated that the rest of the staff at my clinics can take their PTO whenever they want. If multiple clinicians want to take time off at the same time, we just borrow clinicians from other clinics. And the clinic directors take PTO whenever they want, and usually work remotely during travel if anything big comes up. It’s not my fault that there is only one other person available to cover for me. I’m effectively being told that, despite being the lowest paid employee, I am more essential to the clinics functioning than any other individual. It’s ridiculous. This is (maybe) the last straw in a series of things that upper management has done that have really disregarded my time and efforts at work, and my work-life balance when I’m off the clock. Plus, PTO does not roll over into the next calendar year, so I will be earning PTO that week that I cannot use. It’ll be a small amount, but still, it’s the principle of it.
Am I petty for wanting to quit with no notice the Friday before Christmas? I’ve been learning to code in my free time because I want to get out of this industry anyway, so I’m ok with not having this job as a reference. I’m a bit worried financially since I’m very paycheck-to-paycheck, but I have a few months until then to buckle down and learn to code faster and then see if I can get a paid internship somewhere. My city is a great place to be for software devs so that’s not entirely a pipe dream.
I’ll have savings to be ok unemployed January and February as long as nothing happens, which isn’t very long, but I firmly believe that life is too short to give up making those special memories with family that you may not ever get the chance to make again. No job is worth that for me, especially not filing paperwork for less than $20/hr. I also have zero CC debt, and while I’d like to keep it that way, that is also an option I can use short-term if I’m having trouble finding a job. Am I being crazy here?