Holiday joy...
I once worked in a university coffee shop and had quite a few run ins with my boss. We parted on good terms in the end and she is actually a lovely and very sweet woman, but the first six months were hellish. She seemed to have a bit of an unspoken problem with me being a) a man, and b) university educated, so this led to some slightly unfair work practices.

Many of these unfair work practices revolved around holiday, where other people were allowed to take unpaid leave for their holiday after turning up to work half cut (muggins covered, obviously), but I was vaguely threatened with having my holiday cancelled because she found out there was an open day that needed staffing when I was away.

Her meddling got the better of her when I tried to book a couple of days one August. I asked for a Monday off, then a Friday off the following week. She said no, so my girlfriend's family very kindly bought me a ticket to come down to their house after work for the thing we had planned. I came in the next day and was told that actually I could have the days off! So she'd wasted my inlaws' money, which was bad enough. She also then said that because we were quiet I had to use up some more holiday, so she'd assigned me some days in between the days I wanted which I now had to take off to keep the labour down in the off season (apart from one or two days bang small in the middle of the fortnight when she needed me, so tough). Fuck arguing about it, I thought, she'll just take the whole lot away.

Later in the year we're all being told how much holiday we have left. I get my holiday sheet and am truly delighted to find that she has forgotten to put the holiday she made me take in the planner! So I take my extra leave at Christmas and revel in my small and petty revenge...

She leaves a few years later and then, a few weeks after that, so do I (it just wasn't the same without my nemesis...). So I look in my contract for my notice period and see a beautiful sentence: "Annual leave pay is calculated by averaging the daily hours worked in the last twelve weeks". You guessed it, that's not how she'd been doing it. I'd worked at least ten hours overtime pretty much every week since I'd worked there, but only been paid 30 hours a week for holidays. So along with my notice came a breakdown of all my underpayment and a polite but absolutely watertight request for about £500, as I was leaving so couldn't have the error paid back as holiday.

Cheers boss!
(Dowbocop, Sat 11 Apr 2015, 11:51, Reply)