The Ink-Pot and the Palette

"Insidious and toxic" is a great description. We're still heavily union, which has always been greatly to my benefit, though I've never held a represented position.

We top out at three weeks' vacation per year, too, but we can accumulate up to nine weeks. After that we lose it--they simply erase any excess over 360 hours on January 1. This bucket size of 360 hours probably originated with the intention of getting workaholics down off their workaholic horses for everyone's good. But the practical outcome is that it gets harder and harder to find time to take the vacation, and even here, there's a subtle (sometimes not-so-subtle) message that you're a better team player if you just don't use much of it--and certainly never all three weeks at once.

This is how I've wound up with nine weeks of unused vacation on the books that, as of January 1, will be paid into my deferred comp account. It's not as insidious and toxic as the corporate model, but it's gotten progressively less benign over my career. The corporate model tail wags the government dog...just kind of slowly, with a ten year time lag.

That revolution can't come soon enough, but I suspect it's not going to look like a revolution. The metaphor that springs to mind is little green shoots coming up out the ash-field of Mt St Helens in 1981.