Boss Denies Employee's Vacation Request Because It 'Wouldn't Be Fair' To Coworkers
The boss' decision comes despite being fully staffed and other employees claiming it didn't bother them.
fizkes/Shutterstock; Reddit via Canva One wronged employee took to Reddit’s “r/antiwork” subreddit to share her interaction with her boss after booking a trip to Europe and hoping to use some of her PTO.
She claimed it was a birthday trip, and while planning with her friends, they landed on seven to nine days of vacation, claiming that because of the distance it only made sense to go that long. However, it didn’t make sense to her boss as he made it difficult for her to take time off.
Her boss denied her vacation request because it ‘wouldn’t be fair’ to everyone else.
She provided context behind the situation in order to give the people of Reddit the full scope of everything, writing in her post, “I’m going away in a couple [of] months for a birthday trip, we’re going to Europe so it makes sense to go for a good 7-9 days.” However, she explained that her "boss denied my vacation and said I can only go 5 business days because it is unfair to my other co-workers,” she explained.
“I don’t understand how two days makes a difference, I also asked everyone else in my office and no one has an issue or is taking time off at that time.”
Photo: Reddit
She shouldn’t even have had to ask everyone in the office about this — if she has the PTO, then she should be able to use them. Regardless, she asked everyone in the office and everyone seemed to be fine with it, but she went above and beyond to explain why it would be completely fine for her to take that many days off.
If the boss’s argument of “unfairness” was because it would create more work for her coworkers, she argued that the office is “fully staffed and that I’m going at a time that it’s actually very slow in the office as it was also slow last year.”
Her boss still refused her the days off despite their coworkers giving her the thumbs up.
“My boss threw a whole fit and said that it’s unfair to everyone else for me to take so many days off,” she writes. “I said I don’t get how that matters as plenty of people have gone on vacation and a lot of people in the office have gone away at the same time.”
But a lot of people in the comments of her post explained why it actually does matter — because he’s not the one going on a trip to Europe for 2 weeks. “The boss was just envious,” reads the top comment on the post.
Photo: Reddit
Several others mocked him, and others told the woman to stand up for herself. “You’re not ASKING for vacation, [you’re] giving NOTICE that you’re taking [a] vacation,” someone wrote. “Don’t let your boss BOSS you around. Stand your ground. I have NEVER been denied a vacation request.”
People claimed that her boss may have been bluffing and that she should go on vacation regardless of what he thinks. After all, if she already paid for the tickets and had everything planned out, it was out of her control anyway.
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.