Long story short, I started in this company on January of 2022. Here you “earn” your vacation days so I had to wait until the end of the year to take my glorious 10 days. Fine. I had a trip booked for the holidays, I emailed my boss and the VP saying I'd be taking my 10 days then. Denied. I asked why and the reason was “if I give it to you, I'd have to give it to everyone else… take it in January”. FINE.
I had absolutely nothing planned for January so I didn't take them, I justified to myself as a good rat on the race would “that's cool, I'll just accumulate and take them all together this year during summer, it'll be great!”.
So, in 2 weeks we have a week-long trip for a conference and I'm SO BURNED OUT from prepping everything for it. I said, cool, after the trip I'll take all of my days off to relax and reward myself for all the hard work. DENIED. The reason: “after the show, we'll have a lot of people interested in doing business… so… we need you”.
So I don't know what to do. It seems like they'll never “let me” have time off. I'm afraid of standing my ground and getting fired instead. They do need me but the turnover for my role is quite high and they don't seem to care about hiring someone new every year or so. I'm trying to apply for other jobs but nothing really solid happened yet, only a few interviews…
Any suggestions? I'm on the edge and at this point, honestly, I'm thinking of not going to the trip, quit and use my “vacation time” money to live off of until I get a new job (it'd get me through a month tops). But I'm scared cause I work in tech and the market for my position is not great right now.
*Oh, I can't collect unemployment if I get fired.
Thank you…