Woot! I have a week off!

I still have another 4 weeks holiday to take after this before September or I lose it.

I may be flying to Australia in August which will take up 3 weeks to spend time with the Mrs's nutty family.

So... this is my boy time. While the Mrs is at work I'll be happily mapping like a nutter trying to finish detailing my existing maps and punching out EP2_Aquaduct_3-5 beta...

It's crazy that in the UK once you get to a certain level you get 5 weeks vacation (not including sick days or public holidays) yet I seem to not take any. I must be mad. I know how badly you US folks have it.

Expect the forums to be filled all week with my rantings....

I have a holiday of about 10 weeks long now

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

Oh It's not's too bad I get 4 weeks vacation, 12 sick days a year, 4 personal days and 14 holidays a year. That's alot of time off which I take advantage of believe me. It is more than alot of ppl have, just the luck of having my job.
We have kids in Seattle and a place in florida so we travel alot, and I'm thankful we can do that in todays economy.
I am a firm believer in taking time off to enjoy life and relax, mental health time I call it.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

I totally agree that taking holiday time is really important... I just seem to forget to do it and one week bleeds into another.

Hellish stories of crappy US Vacation time must have been a little exaggerated..

They can fire you and throw you out on the street in one day though right?

It depends on whom you work for and your higher ups there. Private sector jobs are generally not as fair when it comes to things like this. Public sector, on the other hand, you have proper vacation time.

It also depends on the state you live in and the type of industry and the local labor laws related to that industry.

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Blame it on Microsoft, God does.

I can tell you from a supervisory standpoint, all that time off sux ass. Hell, in Arkansas they actually have to shut many factories down because of absenteeism due to deer season. I hated it.

The holidays are the worst. You have people thinking about holidays, so their production is way off. Then you have the holiday, with no production. Then the post holiday thinking about what they did, and production is way off.

Now that I am no longer in supervision, I don't think about it as much but I can still sympathize with it.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

You can get fired for no good reason in many of the work force sectors here. Employee's have alot less rights than several years ago. Unions have been busted for the most part except for the trades but they're basically dead anyway because none is building much anymore.
Also alot of job benefits have been reduced or eliminated in alot of places, I'm just lucky they can't do that to us, since I work in government.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Man that is so awful..

Here in UK there is a whole process to go through including several verbal warnings. One written warning with a plan to help you get back on track and then finally they can fire you. Even then you can take them to an Employment Tribuneral for unfair dismissal and you'll probably win because most companies HR staff make slip ups along the way.

There are other ways though. My boss fired several managers recently and basically said to them. Hey you can leave now and take this lump of cash with you or go through the disciplinary process (outlined above) and not get the lump of cash...

:P

Public sector unions here in the UK still have some power but no where near as much as in the 70's when they repeatedly held us to ransom. I think there is a kind of happy medium we've hit these days. It's still worth being part of a Union (although corporates won't recognise them) but they're not the massive risk to the nations well being they once were thanks to Maggie Thatcher... (the evil old witch lol).

Sadly, I don't think they got rid of the unions soon enough. The damage they caused is prolly beyond repair. I wish they had gotten rid of them decades ago.

Arkansas is a "right to work" state. On the surface, that sounds like it would benefit the worker, but nothing could be further from the truth. In essence it means that you can be worked any way the employer see's fit, as long as its non-discriminitory to race or such. You can be fired for virtually any reason imaginable.

Sadly, I don't think there are many employers any longer whom think of the employees first. You will notice however that if a company is beginning to have troubles they will always begin laying people off. First off, employee payroll is one of the very smallest expenditure a company has. Usually well below things like materials and transportation. BUT, employees are the foundation of any company. And we all know what happens if you undermine the foundation. Anywho, even though its been proven thousands of times that layoffs never work, they continue to do it because the same mindset prevails. The persons making the choice feel that THEY are not expendable so they must get rid of some who are.

No company ever thinks that for every "Upper" management position, you can keep 5-25 layborers.. The actual people making the products.

Anywho's, I could tell you stories that would keep you up at night for the crazy thinking that goes on in management.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Yes. I was made redundant two years ago and it's not the first time.

Companies now retain the right to grow or shrink as the market demands and unfortunately that means that employees have to roll with the punches.
I work for corporates mainly but am seriously considering moving on to contracting as I no longer trust my employers. Any employers.

In my last job they implemented a scheme where everyone had the option to work one day less a week whilst getting paid 4 and a half days. They put huge amounts of pressure on us to accept these proposals saying that it would help them to avoid redundancies. I took this as the idea of a 4 day week appealed to me. My wife said I was being ripped off.

They also offered people a 2 month sabbatical with partial pay. Upon your return it they would then pay you slightly less each month to make up for the payments you received whilst away.

I didn't take that option but many did. It was supposed to help the company get through the downturn.

Of course when all these people returned the company announced that redundancies would need to be made anyway. The folks who took the Sabbatical option had the money they had been paid whilst off, taken out of their redundancy settlement...

It's the last time I ever "take one for the team". I will never trust an employer again if it means I lose out financially again or with my personal time and wellbeing.

I don't owe them nothing other than what I choose to give them as far as i'm concerned...

Yes unions served a purpose years ago when they brought ppl out of the dark ages of wages and health care, so to speak, but they got greedy and actually helped drive businesses overseas or out of business over the last few decades.
Problem here really is this country has become a country of of paper pushers, stock market players, and consumers.
We don't manufacture products on the scale we used to it's all made overseas, where it's much cheaper to do. Trade, import and export laws here make it virtually impossible for anything made in the USA to compete with foreign made products price wise.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

We could do it easily. Everything effects everything else in some way but if you begin somewhere at the bottom you can make it work.

IE, the price of fuel. Although by any definition it should not effect pricing nearly as much as people want to believe, due to the weird mindset nowdays it always does. The problem we have now is our weird economy doesn't for some reason want to invest into renewable fuels. The government is actually PAYING farmers to not grow corn to artificially create shortages.

America has millions of acres of fallow ground. Hell, the government won't even allow the farmers to use the ground for another crop, because that ground was ear marked FOR CORN, but they were paid to NOT GROW IT!

The sad thing is, we the people are buying into this shortage crap. I have no clue why, but it seems that nobody takes economics in school anymore. I just cannot grasp it.

Hell a good example would be 1 liter pop. Before Bush, they were on average .65 to .75 a bottle. Fuel went up to 4 bucks a gallon and pop doubled to 1.50. Reason? rising fuel. What's sad is, the trucks hauling them can haul prolly 10,000 bottles at a guess. Trucks both before and after Bush still get about the same mileage so usage didn't go up any. However the price still doubled. What gets me is, they didn't devide the cost by the 10,000 bottles. They just doubled the price. When in actuality, the price might have increased a penny or two. Of course you got costs in manufacturing as well, which has its own transportation costs but in the finally tally, the cost to make the pop prolly only went up 10-20 cents a bottle.

Back to the corn issue. They cry about shortages. Shortages they created. The shortages not only effect fuel but feed grain. Here again, the corn for each is ear marked in advance so technically one should not effect the other due to the destination of each. YET, they still pay the farmers to not grow it. Another thing to consider. We are now growing almost twice as much corn. What's odd is, most of the feed corn uses the waste parts of the corn plant in the making of the feeds. With the fuel corn ONLY using the seeds, the waste portion can go into feed production... YET, they still claim shortages.

Another fallacy. The sweet corn we eat went up.. DUE TO SHORTAGES AGAIN... A completely different kind of corn.

/rant

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The best things in life, aren't things.

Thank Mr Bush and Mr Cheney for the deregulation of fuel prices and allowing them to float with the market...

Given Cheney's connection to Haliburton and Bush's connection to the oil industry.. how is that a supposedly free western advanced country can allow such conflict of interest in the White House???

All I know is it burns my ass whenever I see a gas station advertising 100% gas, no ethinol.

How can anyone not realize that we are a 1st world country, letting 3rd world affairs ruin our economy. We have the land to produce 1.00 a gallon fuel again and we will never see it. I know we have yet to have the distilleries to produce 1.00 a gallon, but we have more than enough of them that they don't need to pay farmers to not grow crops.

You will notice every year that when the corn crops are harvested, they cut back on petroleum to maintain the higher prices. Usually they miscalculate just enough so that the price of gas actually goes up a bit, right after harvest season begins.

Stupid fuctards.

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The best things in life, aren't things.

My boss called me on Sunday, Yesterday and today... so much for a freakin holiday...

Aazell said:
My boss called me on Sunday, Yesterday and today... so much for a freakin holiday...

I always hate being called by teachers on holidays

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Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nibgames

He makes all these noises about how I need a break and how I'm near burn out etc..

Then calls me in huge stress 3 days in a row. I told him I couldn't help him.

lol

Good for you! All we are actually are replaceable pieces like fuses. One goes bad you take it out and plug another in and the machine keeps chugging along.

Sometimes you have to say no so you aren't the fuse that pops.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

Niborius said:
I always hate being called by teachers on holidays

Wait... Teachers can call you? For what purpose?

I saw that too Omega, but since you asked it. Yeah, Niborious over here no teacher better call you unless it's to talk to your parents about something, at least it better be very legit reason to call a student. Even then it's a REALLY big no-no unless the school district admin knows about it, parents know about it and the reason why.

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Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.

If it's a fancy prep school they might.. I spose...

But yeah.. that would seriously raise some eyebrows in the UK too!

I can understand if its your major thesis advisor, because you spend time out of class with them.