big friday news
* PTO hours will carry over up to 120 hours (15 days) annually.
* At year end, any PTO hours above 120 will be lost.
* PTO cash outs will not be allowed during the calendar year. The updated PTO Policy for Non-Union Staff is attached. If you have any questions, please reach out to me or [name redacted]. So first of all, let's talk about my biggest issue, which is with the passive-aggressive, bullshit nature of the language in this email, as though "work-life balance" is really the impetus behind this change. They have been talking openly for months about the financial burden the legally obligated "hazard pay" of an extra $4 an hour for store staff in Seattle due to covid risk has been, and I am convinced it is that more than anything that prompted the policy change. And I totally get that, actually, and I imagine plenty of others would understand it too. So why can't they just be honest about it? I spoke to both Laney and Alexia about this yesterday, and Alexia, who is arguably the most "businesswoman" minded person I know, did have another valid theory: that PCC has gotten so big that it was no longer tenable or cost effective for their books to allow a bunch of employees to cash out their PTO overflow at the end of the year. Again, I can see that being a financial burden, even outside of the hazard pay issue, and it's entirely possible that it's an issue currently compounded by the hazard pay issue. And still: why can't they just be honest about it? I do not believe in the slightest that this is just because they want us to use all of our PTO just because it's in our own best interest. Besides, how does it "reduce stress" when so many of us have more work than we have time to get done, and now we'll have even less time to do it? Work even more hours during our work days? Well, fuck that. I pretty much immediately settled in the attitude that if this means I don't get as much work done, then oh well. I sure as shit am not throwing away my PTO, and I'm also not going to work overtime in order not to do it. The flip side of that is this: it also occurs to me that I will likely be more productive on the days I work if I am taking more PTO, especially the first day after my time off. One way I now plan to use extra PTO is to take at least one extra day off after each trip or time off I take, and now I can just take that day to focus on my photos, the tagging and captioning of them, and writing about the time off—both in the requisite travelogues and in this blog. A lot of time had previously been spent on a lot of that stuff, if not just talking about my time off with people (although that is still bound to happen) when I was at work the first day back, and an extra day of PTO will mitigate that. Besides, I am going to have to figure out how to spread out more than four weeks of extra PTO, in the second half of this year alone. The thing is, I have been relying on cash from PTO payout every December for many years—since 2011, in fact: more than a decade. And I am not the only one who has been counting on that as a bit of a windfall every year, especially those of us who have jobs at a low enough level that we don't even qualify for annual bonuses. (I used to get bonuses randomly, but not since Cate came in as CEO in 2016 and did a bunch of restructuring that implemented a lot of far more corporate-like policies.) I have long used that money to cover Christmas shopping, and travel expenses. It was a huge proportion of what I used to cover our trip to Australia in 2020, and had been what I planned toward expenses for returning to Australia late next February. I won't change my mind about the timing of our return to Australia—because I want to be there when Sydney hosts World Pride—so now it's just going to cut even deeper into my saved travel expenses, and maybe nearly deplete it. On top of that, I sure as shit am not going to waste any PTO I have over 120 hours at the end of the year. Had this policy change happened earlier, I could have spread my ridiculous amount of annual PTO I get—because I have been at PCC so long—over the entire year. Instead, having taken 88 hours of PTO (11 days) over the first half of the year, I now need to take 224 hours of PTO (28 days!—more more than five and a half weeks) by December 31. I'll figure it out soon enough, but right now I'm planning vacations during which I don't have a clue what I'll be doing with myself. I did figure, fuck it, I'll just take a full week off during the holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas. As Shobhit noted, then I won't have to work store holiday-week store shifts! We'll see how easily I get away with that, but I'm absolutely going to try it. I have to take all this PTO now, and I need to spread it out, and it makes less sense for me to take those weeks earlier in November or December when a) there's already a holiday-pay day within each of those weeks, and b) taking those weeks off will be by far the easiest for fitting into my work load, as they're never that busy anyway. In my current projected PTO days through the end of the year, I added a day off after returning from Denver in a couple of weeks. I think this has pretty much settled our plan to go to Vancouver for Vancouver Pride—especially since our Hotels.com booking for Victoria last month got me over the threshold of 10 bookings to get me one free night's stay in a hotel—and I added two PTO days for that. I've got a full week (five days) of PTO arbitrarily slated for late August / early September. I added a day to the Family Vacation trip to Leavenworth in late September, which I was likely to do anyway so I could tack on the previous Friday as a day off and we could go celebrate Christopher's 50th birthday the weekend prior. I went ahead and added a week (5 days) to late October / early November, in this case straddling a weekend so that I would still have some work days both the previous and following week, and this way I'll be on PTO both over Shobhit's birthday on Sunday October 30 and on Halloween, October 31; then with the aforementioned "buffer day" on November 1. And after that, the aforementioned weeks over Thanksgiving and Christmas. That should cover it. Or, if I want to rearrange things here and there, I could make a couple of those weeklong vacations shorter, and at some other time take an extra visit to Dad and Sherri in Olympia or to see Jennifer in Shelton, or something to that effect. Time will tell. I could also just do both of those things when taking time off in late August. Keep in mind PTO also covers "sick time," although when I was out for covid in April I didn't have to use PTO—they had a sort of "covid time" for me to use. I have no idea whether I'll be able to do that again. But if not, I'm actually thinking I will just keep the PTO planned as is and let sick time cut into the planned 118-hour balance I have now projected at the end of the year. I would much rather do that than lessen my PTO plans "in case" of getting sick, and then risk still having a balance of PTO that I might lose. If they're going to deny me the cash I've relied on for a decade, I'm going to deny them the loss of unused PTO. The nature of how PTO has accrued at PCC has changed over the years. When I started, they separated "vacation pay" from "sick pay," and in the first year alone I got three weeks vacation time—with one week of that understood to be used as holiday pay, whichever holidays I chose. I could take federal holidays off, or not. At the time, the only days each year that the entire company shut down, including the office, were Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. That's still the case now, but as of around 2015, the office began to close, with holiday pay, on certain other holidays, if I remember correctly starting with Memorial Day and Independence Day. For a few years they added Labor Day, and most recently they added New Year's Day. And as of 2015 none of these days off took anything out of PTO, but when they made this change, they also combined "vacation" and "sick time" and just called it all "PTO." The second year, though, vacation time went up to four weeks—or, in effect, three weeks of vacation plus another week for holiday use. That was the case between years 2 and 5; after my fifth anniversary, another week was added. Even by this time it was feeling like I had more vacation time than I could use. The last jump was at the 10-year mark, which I believe took it up to roughly six weeks vacation a year. It was July 2015 when they combined vacation time and sick time and they called it "PTO," causing my per-paycheck accrual to jump from 9.23 hours to 10.83 hours, which it remains to this day. Bearing in mind that it's also intended for sick time use, that works out to 35.2 days of PTO per year, or barely over seven work weeks (periods of five days). As noted already, I have only taken 11 days of PTO so far this year. Factoring in the PTO balance I already started this year with, I've got another 28 days to take so that I don't end up with a balance over 120 hours on December 31. Strangely, the more I think about it, the more I'm looking forward to this. I would much prefer the cash, but it actually could be argued that this desire is not the correct way to prioritize. It probably will be better for my "work-life balance," in the long run, especially if I maintain my boundaries of never taking my work home with me or working outside regular hours. None of that stops me, however, from resenting the way this policy change was communicated—late on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, when they knew most people wouldn't even read it until Tuesday, and the few who saw it on Friday had little to no recourse for venting frustration with it. We even quite recently had our last All Staff Town Hall Zoom meeting, which means the next one won't be for another month or so. But, I bet anything this will come up as an issue for at least some people. Though it pains me to admit it, I suppose I should admit that their strategy has kind of worked on me: I've had some time to let the bit of fury die down, and see how this change might actually work to my advantage in ways I didn't think about initially. It's still going to be a significant financial hit for me. There's no getting around that. So anyway, how about the rest of the weekend? Not a whole lot to report about Friday evening or basically all of Saturday, except to say that on Saturday I took myself to the AMC Theater in the U District—and it sure is fantastic having Light Rail as a quick transit option now—to see the period romance Mr, Malcolm's List. Which was . . . fine. Otherwise, Shobhit and I have watched a lot of TV and movies over the weekend. We finally watched my library DVD copy of In & Out on Saturday night, which I decided to watch after listening to a podcast "Pride Flashback" episode about it, almost exclusively talking about it fondly. I always felt that movie was comparatively slight and far weaker in execution than The Birdcage, which had come out the previous year (these came out in 1996 and 1997), and if anything holds up about In & Out, it is that assessment. The movie is blandly enjoyable, but it also relies heavily on gay stereotypes in a way that would never work today. The Birdcage is not perfect on that front, but it's far better, and thus holds up a whole lot better after all this time as well. it doesn't feel anywhere near as dated as In & Out does, and I'd say about 90% of The Birdcage would work just fine if it were released today. Okay maybe 80%. Still, my point is, the percentage of In & out is far lower, and it wasn't as good even by mid-nineties standards. I had wanted to watch that movie while it was still Pride month, and we watched it on July 2. Close enough, I guess. Yesterday, then, we had two separate movie-watches at home with friends. First was Scream 3 with Laney. Shobhit had the day off yesterday (as he also does today) so he watched with us, even though he had to work the day we saw Scream 2. I think the assessment that the third is the weakest of the first three still holds, but, Scream 3 was still more fun than I remembered—especially Parker Posey as the woman playing the actor playing Courtney Cox's TV journalist character. We've now gone through all the ones I have seen before; the next two I'll be seeing for the first time. My understanding is that Scream 4 isn't great, and the reboot/sequel titled again just Scream from this year is better than anyone could have expected. They've all been fun to watch at home though so I expect no matter what, the next ones will be fun, especially watching with Laney. We've scheduled the next movie watch for Sunday July 24. Shobhit and I were going to make popcorn from sample popcorn kernels I have from work, but then when we were out grocery shopping he decided he wanted to try out this new cake shop in the Central District. He had me look up cake shops on Yelp, and I thought I had found what he was looking for when we parked right in front of a place called Lowrider Cookie Company. We went in there and had ordered a couple of their cookies, about to pay, when Shobhit asked the young lady at the register, "You're minority owned, right?" The lady said no, and said we were probably looking for a place she was able to point to right across the street and one house over, called Shikorina Pastries. Shit. Shobhit was looking for the minority-owned place. But, we were about to be run up at the cookie shop, so I didn't think we should bail on that place. We still bought the cookies, and then walked across the street, where a very nice young—and very tall—Black lady with a mask on was there by herself, taking orders through a window in the wall that made a sort of outer-indoor area inside the front entrance to the building. There was a sign up saying masks were required, and Shobhit hadn't even brought one. They had masks provided and so he put one on. I ordered a hot chocolate, which took several minutes to make but that's what made it worth it: she cooked it with melted Theo chocolate in a pan on a stove way in the back of the large kitchen area she had (seen through the little order window), and it was spectacular. I still added dark chocolate banana whiskey to it when I got home. Shobhit also ordered a brownie, and we were on our way. I could not resist the peanut butter stuffed cookie I had gotten from the first place so I ate that with my hot chocolate during the movie, basically having a sugar explosion for lunch. (Somehow, my weight was actually down this morning.) And then, at 6:00, Alexia came over for dinner and a movie, the dinner this time being tostadas, which turned out quite tasty. We had originally planned to have her over for this on Friday, but she had a close-contact exposure to someone at work, for multiple days, who had tested positive for covid. By today, her testing negative was enough time passed to feel safe having her over—especially once Laney, who is immunocompromised as someone on heart medication due to a heart attack several years ago—had come and gone. On Friday, it was only two days since Alexia's exposure, so even though she tested negative that day, it wasn't enough time for me to feel comfortable with Laney coming on Sunday. But, then I had the idea of having Alexia just come Sunday evening after Laney left, and she was available. Laney had already asked that Shobhit and I test before she came over, after she learned of how lax Shobhit in particular has become with max-wearing (something that endlessly frustrates me: we go into a store, I wear a mask and he doesn't; he's no longer wearing a mask at work; it's almost like it nullifies the point of my wearing a mask, except I suppose I'm still lessening risk, particularly of spreading anything to others, by at least half—god forbid Shobhit actually give enough of a shit about other people to do the same). I have a bunch of tests about to expire on the 7th, in addition to multiple boxes of tests I had to throw out due to them expiring last month, so I figured, what the hell, I'd test on Saturday too. So I actually tested twice, on both Satursay and yesterday; I had Shobhit test yesterday. All tests were negative. This was after, just yesterday morning, I got a phone notification of "possible exposure" on June 25 or 26. That places it squarely on Pride weekend, but a) a full week later, anything to come up would have likely come up already; b) although it was a crowded Pride, it was still all outdoors; and b) we're still within the 90-day window since previous infection during which reinfection is unlikely (from the same strain, anyway). I actually texted Laney all of this yesterday, in the interest of full disclosure, so she could still make an informed decision regarding whether she still wanted to come, and she did. Alexia also tested yesterday, so all of us in this condo and the one next door were testing negative. Alexia and I had decided our next franchise marathon would be Star Wars feature films, of which there are 11—but, once we get to the Original Trilogy, we're going to watch the original theatrical release versions I have on a DVD box set I purchased a couple of decades ago when it was still possible to do so. I haven't watched the original versions since then, and am eager to see them again how people in the seventies and eighties saw them. But, because I always feel this is the best way to do it, we're going in story order, not release order, so this way we get the crap prequels out of the way first. The thing I was most fascinated by when watching The Phantom Menace last night was that, even though Alexia and I both have plenty of criticisms of that movie, which we discussed plenty last night, there's no getting around how compelling that movie is, even with its bad and stupid elements. I kept looking at both Alexia and Shobhit—who often falls asleep when we're watching movies—and they were rapt, from start to finish. Twenty-three years after that movie's release, I think there's something to be said for that. And then, after the movie must have ended around 9:00 or a bit thereafter, we got into intricate discussions with Alexia that covered economics and politics and family and more, and she probably hung out longer, just talking, than she ever had before. She was here until after 11:00, which was kind of a shock even to her. Shobhit and I are finding her to be a lot more conservative than she initially lets on—"I'm very libertarian in my believes," she said—but civil discourse about all these things, especially when we disagree, is a good thing. I even noted while we were talking that "Well-laid arguments help us clarify our positions." Indeed, it was very intellectually stimulating conversation. Oh! I nearly forgot—we did have a bit of socialization on Friday after all. After Alexia couldn't make it (or basically I disinvited her, until Sunday), Sachin woud up coming over, and having some of the dinner Shobhit had already been planning on cooking. He made a delicious paneer dish, an okra dish I wouldn't eat (and not even Sachin cared for), and his characteristically delicious scratch-made flatbreads to eat with it, bhaturas. I didn't spend a huge amount of time with them, but I did eat with them and visit, so I guess it still counts as a Social Review point for both of them. [posted 9:33 am]