I really hate what we do (or don't do) with vacation/personal/medical leave time in this country. A few years ago, I took this job down here in Houston, it was a dream job for me in terms of the industry I wanted to work in. It was for a big company but under a government contract, so while I work onsite at a government entity (like most here) I'm a contractor. Every 6-10 years, the contract goes through a rebid process which can ultimately lead to employees staying in the same role but moving to a new company. After the rebid a couple years ago, I was moved to a small company (less than 200 employees) and all of the companies on the contract changed how they handled time off. Instead of having my 3 weeks of vacation, 2 weeks of sick time and 1 week of dependent sick time (rarely used more than a week of the combined sick time) I was now given 4 weeks of PTO to use for anything/everything. On the surface, it seems like a cool concept as it can lead to more vacation time if I stay healthy. However, in reality all it does is lead to all of my co-workers bringing their sickness into work since the system rewards them for coming in sick. Futhermore, my co-workers can sell back any unused PTO at the end of the year... so the incentive for coming in sick is not just extra vacation, it can be financial as well.

tl;dr summary: tired of co-workers coming in sick... now I've caught the bug going around the office which is the last thing I need right now while I'm still in the post-op honeymoon phase.

My last boss, I am still in the same job, but she has moved on, was very strict about, if you are sick you go home. About half my department is on a PTO kind of set up and the rest of us are on the vacation/sick leave/etc program. She wasn't really in charge of everyone, but would actually send sick people home over their refusals! I have been sick a lot less than I was even when I was a teacher, although I take more sick days now because when I was a teacher, you had to be nearly on death's door to take a day off because it was so much work to be gone!

I agree that sick people need to stay home and quarantine themselves instead of making me sick!

pam

As the son of two teachers, I know all about that!

...although I take more sick days now because when I was a teacher, you had to be nearly on death's door to take a day off because it was so much work to be gone!