>>You know what I would like???? Not having to use up 3 of my vacation days during Christmas week!!!
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>>Our illustrious VP of Finance has decided that, since not much work gets done during Christmas week, that we'll just close down our company and everyone *has* to take vacation that week. I should be able to take vacation when I damn well please, not when the company mandates that I *have* to take it. This really, really sucks. It supposedly makes sense on paper, financially speaking. But in reality, it's just plain stupid!
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>>Of course, there are ways around it ... just work anyway, mark it as vacation days and then take time off later that isn't marked as vacation. But still ... I DON'T LIKE IT!!
>>
>>~~Bonnie
>
>I'm in the same boat except that it's 4 days around July 4th. I don't have too much of a problem with it. I work for a small manufacturing company and it really makes sense to shut down the whole plant for a week rather than have to schedule the workload around individual vacation schedules.
>
>My understanding is that this is rather common in manufacturing environments. Apparantly most of our suppliers and customers already shut down for that week so we would have had many people hanging around with literally nothing to do.

Its the same here. My brother worked for a car maker here and they shut down at Christmas and also in the summer so main holidays where fixed. Typically a few people would work those periods to do maintenance.