| Another reason for not using them up is that one of the times of year that many people do often want to take time off during has a lot of paid holiday days already for many people, so you can get a large block of time off only using a few vacation days. I'm speaking of Christmas/New Year, which many people like to take off to be with family. At many places, Christmas and the day before are paid holidays, and at many places New Years and the day before are also paid holidays. Suppose that in a given year you get a Tuesday and Wednesday off for the Christmas holidays and Tuesday and Wednesday off next week for New Years. With one day of vacation (Monday), you turn the Christmas holiday into a block of 5 consecutive days off (2 weekend days, 1 vacation day, 2 holidays). Toss in 2 more vacation days (Thursday and Friday), and now for a cost of 3 vacation days you 9 consecutive days off. Add another vacation day next Monday, and four a total cost of 4 vacation days you get 12 consecutive days off. 6 vacation days will get you 16 consecutive days off. If you job is such that it naturally gets a lot less busy during the holidays, and it is possible to do it remotely, you might even convince your employer to work at home on some of those days, which will be such light work that it does not interfere with your vacation activities, but counts as a work day, not a vacation day. I've usually been able to do that at least one day each week--check some logs, run some scripts that fix some database problems that some old crappy legacy code that no one ever gets the time to rewrite cause, spend 10 minutes or so figuring out to fix a couple things the scripts cannot, and then just check work email a few times during the day to look for anything else that comes up (which usually is nothing), and my employer will let me call that a work day...and so I can get those 16 consecutive days off with only 4 days vacation used. Even if you are only earning two weeks (10 days) of vacation a year, if you take you vacations as above it is easy to end up accumulating them. |