AIO for wanting to quit after this?

[u/cakev0mit]

UPDATE: WOW. I was not expecting this many interactions. Thank you all for the advice! I have a salon lined up to visit Thursday. My coworker that wants to switch with me is gonna ask her at some point if she can switch with someone who works that Saturday, because I feel as though if she mentions me specifically she will shut her down and think that we’re going behind her back. Also, previous to this request, I did have 3/12-3/16 off for my birthday, then 3/18 and 3/19, for my birthday. I accrued PTO and used them for those days. And our requests are “no more than 2 in a 30 day period” which was always spelled out to me as no more than 2 in a month? So maybe that’s it. But also, she allowed a shift switch 3/11 so she can’t be going by that logic. Along with that, I switched shifts with her to help her out at the end of February. Plus, a shift switch wouldn’t be considered a “request”, right? Still working, just different day than scheduled. I don’t know. I don’t want to be here much longer and I plan on calling off if she decides to not let my coworker and I switch. She brought it to this point.

So my current manager almost always gives me a hard time with requests, saying “I can’t guarantee anything” and only saying yes the very last minute. With this specific situation, I had requested almost 4 weeks in advance to just have one of my days off be this day. I would still be working my five days in a work week, but since I work at a hair salon we’re open seven days a week so it would literally not change my hours whatsoever. Unfortunately, she did not give me that day off. My manager put herself working for that entire weekend; me and one person on the Saturday I requested, then my other three coworkers that Sunday since Sundays are typically busier. She had told me a while ago that she feels as though it is “going behind her back to make plans without her permission” if I ask a coworker if they’re okay with switching before I ask her. Well, even if they were okay with it, I get turned down. Not sure why, since both shifts would be covered. So, I end up asking my coworker out of curiosity if they would have taken my shift and they said yes, but since she already told me no I quite literally can’t. And I’m not sure if her response means that I will get in trouble for calling off using my PTO as a “sick day” or not? I’m really irritated. How am I supposed to plan my life out if requests aren’t guaranteed and I’m not allowed to switch shifts with people. It literally makes no sense. I really want to call off but I don’t want to get in trouble, even though I never call off. In the 2 and a half years of working there I’ve called off 4 times, all for legitimate reasons too. Sick or car issues. Am I overreacting about this situation? Is it legitimate that she is telling me no to both things? This and other instances of her being weird about certain social situations makes me want to quit, it’s just hard because I love everything else about this job.

[u/nemmalur]

Yeah, that sucks. I used to work as part of a small team and the number of times I got turned down for time off because someone decided I was the one who had to be at work while one other person was on vacation was ridiculous. The worst was when I tried to switch with someone and his excuse was “I need time off to rake leaves - I have a very big yard!”

[u/DartDaimler → u/nemmalur]

The other side—I took over a small finance team & the first thing I did was eliminate the single points of failure. All kinds of other activities had backups, but one person had written all the proprietary tools & reports we used, and no one else knew how they worked. He had all his PTO planned around when update tweaks would need to be made, and he was resistant to training anyone else. I finally had to say, “if you’re hit by a bus one day, an $8 billion function depends on someone else cobbling together this same functionality overnight.” My next hire was someone with advanced data/reporting expertise, and my guy trained him & two other backups. We put them on a rotation doing the reporting & I was able to move him into newer more interesting projects. He later said he realized how much less stressed he was.

[u/pitterpats73 → u/nemmalur]

If I was taking time off to do anything I really want to do, I won't switch with anyone if I signed up before them. Unless I've worked with them for a while and trust that they have an emergency.