Weighing My Options
Feb 13th, 2010 by Alex
I can’t usually work from home, but yet our corporate offices were open this past week. Since I couldn’t get to my office, I ended up not working quite a bit. Without sharing all of the specifics of corporate woe, here are my options.
- Work 9 hour days until March 19th, effectively making up the time.
- Take 22 hours of vacation time.
- Hope that the for-profit revenue-seeking corporate types take pity and offer to pay flat out, similar to the government’s administrative leave.
The third one’s a laugh and a long shot, but I suppose the fourth option would be a combination of the first two. Needless to say, I’m not thrilled about any of these.
Which is why I was at work Saturday…
It definitely impacts a lot of us who work in special intranet environments instead of having a nice VPN connection and working from home like a lot of commercial companies we get to suck it up and go without a week of pay or find a way to make it up.
I’ll be making up more than 40 hours over the next 2 weeks (including a lot of weekend time I anticipate).
This is why I’m at work on a federal holiday. I elected not to try and get in the first Friday of the snow, and because the government was closed, I then lost another four days. We’re not permitted to telecommute since we work on-site, and when the government is closed, we are not allowed to come in (not that I would have wanted to, with metro and roads as horrific as they were). So I’m out an entire week’s worth of PTO- which leaves me negative for the year so far. Even making up time today, and working longer hours the next few weeks, I basically just lost a week’s vacation through no fault of my own. I can’t work on weekends like Steven, either- though there’s plenty for us to do here at work, the client won’t authorize it.
The joy of federal contracting. “Beltway bandits” indeed.
Steven: The only good part is that I sufficient time to make it up without having to do 12-15 hour days.
J: Though I’m currently closer to your situation, we’re working to get some weekend time approved given the circumstances. So far it looks promising.
Although my office was initially open Monday, because so many people wound up not being able to come in, they gave people who made it additional PTO, and did not penalize those who weren’t able to get in.
And then they wound up closing Wednesday, and Thursday. I also missed Tuesday, but they’re letting us work extra this week to make up those hours — which they usually don’t permit. I don’t know how many 10 hours day I can stand, so I might only reclaim 4 of those missed 8. We’ll see.