I was briefly productive, but am actually considering going home because I am starting to not feel well.

I love my boss. I love him so very dearly. But I HATE THIS FUCKING PLACE. At this point, there's no way I would ever recommend anyone I know, no matter how desperately in need of a job they are, come to work here.

Because all my options WRT sick leave/disability leave/maternity leave were not clearly explained to me way back when I got stuck on bed rest, I ended up having to put Matilda in day care and come back to work when she was 4 months old even though I had almost five weeks of untouched sick leave in my time bank.

I now have almost 300 hours, and as far as anyone can tell me, when I leave here they're just gone. Oh, I'll get 50% reinstated if I decide to come back within 6 months, and 80% if I come back in less than 6 weeks. But that's it, as near as I can tell. If I'm very very lucky they'll get added to my service time so I can collect an extra buck-fifty a month when I retire. If I'm not lucky, they just vanish into the ether and the university essentially got 300 free work hours out of me over the course of my time here.

I seriously want to fucking kill someone.

eta: Yep, it's completely fucking gone. Because I'm leaving before retirement, I just donated 2 months of free work to them.

mr. flea has a sonicare and LOVES it. I hate it. Toothbrushes are icky, and the sonicare tickles me.

Ummm, JZ. Not that I want to stop a glorious rant, and you do rant well, that is not uncommon wrt sick leave. From what I have seen with all the jobs my husband has been through, he will get paid for any vacation time in his last check, but sick leave is gone. Fat lot of good it does to be healthy.

Look, I don't have to endorse Communism in order to write about it.

I think this isn't a good analogy.

How about lacking a belief in quantum mechanics? If your disbelief in qm prevents you from producing accurate work in a physics department, then there is a problem. I don't know what to think about this specific case since I don't know the details. If the problem was just belief then I think the guy has a case, if it was resulting in substandard work then it's a different story.

Sophia, you just made me weep a little at my desk.

JZ, that sounds horrible and frustrating.

Sophia, I'm boggling. she's a college senior and her mom's written all of her papers? What was the mom thinking -- how does that help her daughter one bit, and wouldn't that be considered cheating?

Well, around here all you hear about is how, once you're vested, unused sick leave becomes part of your service time once you retire. No word about how you must retire from this place; the magic phrase always used is just "vested" (10 years). And when I left for the bed rest and then Matilda, the HR people here hustled me through the short-term disability process at the speed of light, told me something different every time I asked about combining sick and vacation leave and disability, and didn't tell me until three weeks before my time was up that since I'd been on disability I could no longer use any of my sick leave. I would have used that FIRST if anyone had explained that in clear, simple English. Or even muddy, verbose English. I can man up and take on a few polysyllabic paragraphs, provided they contain some actual pertinent information.

I ended up scrambling to find daycare, leaving home a month earlier than I'd planned, and spending the next year in a financial sinkhole. It doesn't seem like that much, but an extra month of full-scale pay without having to worry about day care? It might not have made that much difference, but at least maybe I wouldn't have had to sell off my vintage dresses to pay the gas bill last winter.

I'm sorry JZ, that sucks. I wish the HR people would have been on the ball.

I wish the HR people would have been on the ball.

Unless they have a secret "confuse people and prevent them by any means possible from using the sick leave they have coming to them, thus saving the university a bundle of money that can then be shoveled into incentive pay and mansions for prospective vice-chancellors" policy, in which case they're right on the ball.