Flexing

The big work news of the moment is the entire organization is having to flex.  Apparently we are way behind on budget estimates and earnings and opposed to laying people off, the board has decided to have people flex instead.  For those that don’t know, flexing means changing our schedule to help meet the budget by taking PTO or unpaid time off.  Every pay period every person working for the orgnaization is required to flex a minimum of 8 hours.  Yes, 8 hours per pay period and we only earn 7.077 vacation hours per pay period.  This way all of the people that have hundreds of hours are forced to take that and that time is off of the books and if it’s unpaid then they just don’t have to pay you for time worked at that point (although you still accrue PTO based on the 72 hours you will be working and can save).  If someone takes vacation then this can benefit the department beacuse that one person is compensating and the rest of the department will only have to make up the difference.  As you can imagine a lot of people are pretty upset by this but no one in my department at least has found another job yet.   

I’m taking the time unpaid so that I can say all of my PTO up for when I go on maternity leave, otherwise I would be in the hole and would eventually run out of PTO before then anyway and it’d just be a lose-lose situation.  This way *hopefully* I’ll be able to start my maternity leave at the beginning of February, as planned, and then after the baby is born go into my sick time and finally use my short term disability for as long as I can.  I’m being optimistic and looking at it as one less day a pay period that I have to work and I’m taking Wednesdays so Casey and I will both be off.