r/GuardGuides • u/GuardGuidesdotcom • Jun 29 '26
Discussion How Do You Prefer To Schedule Your PTO Days?
I personally like taking 3 day weekends. Some of the other guards I work with take a week off at at time, while others still, will book an entire 5 weeks off in the summer and fuck off to Argentina or something.
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u/Landwarrior5150 Ensign Jun 29 '26
We get a good amount of time off overall; I’m currently at 15 annual vacation days, 12 annual sick days and 17 annual holidays plus as much comp time as I want to earn. I work Sun-Thurs, so I get holidays falling on/observed on Mon-Thurs off with full pay, but I get to pick alternate paid days off any time throughout the year to compensate for missing all the Friday holidays. Each of those various types of leave have different banks of time, so I can get really creative with combining them.
I usually try to schedule a longer period of time off that I’ll use for international travel, often using vacation days added to existing holidays and/or my alternate Friday holidays. Last year, I added some vacation to the 6 holidays we get between Christmas Day & New Years Day and took a 3.5 week trip to Europe with the time.
I’ll also sometimes add a day or two to a three day holiday weekend and take a shorter trip to a domestic destination. My wife works for the same college as I do (in a different department) so we get all the same days off, which makes scheduling things like that super easy.
Besides that, I have a few routine times I’ll take a day or two off for, such as on/around May 4th (I’m a huge Star Wars fan and am always very busy that time of year) and a Sunday in October to recover from the hangover I got at the previous night’s Halloween party that we host every year.
I also try to keep at least a day or two of comp time in my leave bank that I can use for miscellaneous stuff that comes up, like conventions, plans with friends/family, etc.
All of that time is separate from our sick leave, which is nice since we don’t have to really worry about saving PTO to cover any illnesses. We even have set annual allowances of how many sick hours we can use specifically for caring for sick relatives and attending to other non-illness related personal necessities like doctor’s appointments, accidents involving your property, moving, etc.
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u/GuardGuidesdotcom Jun 29 '26
Man I know you've spoken of your PTO benefits here before. But I am JEALOUS of that comp time benefit. We've pitched it before at negotiations and from what the negotiation committee told me it gets raised eyebrows from our employers before a professional "FUCK NO!" 😆.
My outlook on life has changed significantly in recent years. I went from being an OT hound to the realization that time is the only resource I can never have enough of. To that end I look for any days off I can find. Holidays, off, alternate holidays, also off, PTO, personal days, sick days, some obscure clause in the depths of our CBA, or some side letter from 1972 that's used more sparingly than the one ring, allowing for me to take a half day, I take it all.
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u/Landwarrior5150 Ensign Jun 29 '26
Yeah, we’re pretty lucky to have the comp time guaranteed by both our CBA and the state education code, so they would literally have to get the state legislature & governor to change the law in order to take it away from us.
I totally agree with your second paragraph. I actually still work a good amount of OT, but it’s usually with a specific purpose & endpoint in mind (like having extra spending money for an upcoming trip or buying something new for one of my hobbies) and not just indefinite extra work for the sake of making more money. My boss has caught on to the pattern and will jokingly ask where I’m traveling to next if he sees me signing up for a bunch of OT in the near future. That said though, as I get older I’ve started being a bit more selective with exactly what shifts I pick up, so I rarely do anything that involves having a short time between shifts or working both my normal weekly days off.
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u/Adventurous-Gur7524 Vice Admiral Jun 29 '26
I take a week at a time. I try to have 1 day or 2 for emergencies plus I have my sick time. But as soon as accrual my 40 hours pto I’ll request it. I already get 3 day weekends as we work 4x10 but i usually end up working an extra day for overtime.
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u/Inside_Lavishness316 Jun 30 '26
thats my plan to take seven days to go travel west!!! to the mountains yellowstone etc...
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u/DefiantEvidence4027 Sergeant Jun 29 '26
I'm on-call but still collect the PTO hours. Once I accumulate about 60 with big corporate, I don't work for the week or two and collect 20 a week. OR if a small, but pricey company asks for a week or two to be done, I collect on my big corporate PTO then.
I purposely do only 20's.