WOW only 10 days for vacation and sick, no way I could work for your company. I get 25 vacation days, 8 paid holidays, and I accrue 5 days of sick per year, caps at 360 hours of sick time.

In my first 20 years at this job I would spread out my time with a day here and there or two. Granted I didn't start with that much time, I think I started with 10 days of vacation. I was talking to our CIO a couple years ago and we talked about how we each use our vacation. He told me he at least books two weeks off in a row each year to truly disconnect from work. This really hit home with me that I wasn't truly enjoying my time off knowing I would be back to work in a day or two, maybe a little longer if I scheduled around a holiday. So I talked to my wife about this and we decided to try it. We took our first trip to Mexico(Cabo San Lucas) and loved it. And he was right, before the end of the first week I had truly disconnected from work and was enjoying my vacation. Second week was even better.

Last year was two weeks in Hawaii, the best two weeks of my life. 🙂

We had a guy here, 'Larry' that worked every day for 30+ years. This man only took a 1/2 day off when his father died. As you can imagine one day 'Larry' didn't show up for work. We find out he died of a heart attack. Now did 'Larry' get anything more from the company buy giving up all those vacation days? Nope, they hired a replacement for him within two weeks. They didn't care, so take your vacation, life is indeed to short.

Not to open a can of worms from a previous post, but for those of you with less time, wouldn't a union be great to fight for you to have more time off(paid)? I know I would, 30+ days off sounds better to me like they have in the UK.