We are leaving early, but I feel bad because my student needs the money so I am trying to figure out how she can stay. I also feel annoyed, because she is leaving early today to write a paper she has to turn in tomorrow, but I think making her stay today and leave Friday is actually petty when I don't have an urgent project for her.

Scrappy, I am so sorry to hear about kitty.

We get to leave early on Friday, too, which means 1:30 for me, so I'm planning on not taking a lunch. Last time we had an early day I was an hourly temp and my manager couldn't figure out how to let me leave early and still get paid for the full day (which is how it's supposed to work here) so I didn't.

Here they have decided that if you are hourly, you can't get paid for leaving early, because if you leave and are clocked in, the University is legally responsible for you still, even though you are not actually at work! So hourly people have to use their vacation time, and salaried people do not. There was a big outcry when they first started, because they were going to make salaried staff use vacation (even though it is less than a half day, and we can only take half days), but not salaried faculty.

We're still on summer hours, which means everyone gets to leave early on Friday except my department who does summer hours weird.

I don't get to leave early on Friday, and I have Monday off -- but I don't get paid for it!

As some of you might have surmised, I hate my job.

One time, at my old job, they replaced the carpet AND had the walls repainted -- both things were done overnight on a weeknight (because during the week is much cheaper than over the weekend), and we all had to work the next day.

Already you can see where this is going.

The building is your typical modern office building with windows that don't open. So the day after the carpeting and painting -- really, mere hours after those things were finished -- the fumes from the carpet (offgassing, I guess?) and the paint smell was making people sick. And my boss, who has severe asthma, was literally unable to breathe. My own asthma was aggravated, and finally my boss and I left (I actually followed her in my car to her allergist's office so I could be sure her lungs didn't collapse while she was behind the wheel).

The kicker is that when we told people we were leaving, Big!Boss's daughter (who was our HR "department") said that of course we could leave. Then later we found out the hours were taken out of our vacation time because we "chose" to leave during a workday.

We went over her head and complained long and loud about being in a physically dangerous situation that was *caused* by the company, but we didn't "choose" to file Workers' Comp, and by the way, how about you put our vacation hours back?

They did.

Lots of things I don't miss about that place. (However, I do miss a paycheck.)

You went over her head to her father? That's got to be the weirdest dynamic.

I was super excited when I went from hourly to salary, even though I was still making $10/hour, at least I didn't have to be sad about holidays anymore.

I'm still unemployed, so I can only look at people who have jobs to get let off early from with the bitterest jealousy.

You went over her head to her father? That's got to be the weirdest dynamic.

Actually, no; to the person who was the managing editor. We told him he needed to run interference with Big!Boss (this is because, in the past, when Daughter took our department's laser printer away because *she* needed it [you know, because it's not like the Editorial department printed out dozens of galleys a day to be proofread], we objected, and Big!Boss ripped us all a new one and ordered us to apologize to her for our behavior [nope, that's not even a joke] [and we never got a printer back]).

Oh good lord.