floating holiday

Our time off at work is one of the better setups I've heard of. You have the option to work either 9 or 8 hours days. If you chose nine, you work eight - nine hour days and one - eight hour day in two weeks which gives you 40 hours and then you get a Friday off; you have to work every other Friday. On top of that, you accrue hours (we call them p-hours, or Pay hours) to take as vacation. I think I accrue 12 vacation hours a month which equates to 16 days a year. The kicker is, these hours carry over year to year and can reach a max of 360 hours, or 40 days (8 work weeks - two months). In addition, we also have paid holidays in which we close shop. Now where I work we don't take typical holidays off (MLK day, etc). We work most holidays, with the exceptions being Labor Day, Christmas, NYE, and Thanksgiving. We get a few other days in between including Xmas eve, NYE eve which brings our holiday total of days closed to 10. Well, somehow it works out that we are technically given 11, since we get a free day which we call a "floating holiday". This day is given to us since we’re not getting MLK day off - or some other goofy holiday. The floating holiday we are given is the one day we can choose to use when ever we want, but it can't carry over or traded for p-hours. It's use it or lose it.

Now the reason for my post. I found out today that I forgot to use my floating holiday this year. The crappy part is, I wasn't planning on taking any vacation the rest of the year, since work is closed from December 20th to January 3rd. Normally I'd have to take 6 p-days worth of vacation and would get 4 days of holiday pay. This year is different though. We are so busy I'm going in while the plant is shut down and working those 6 days we're supposed to be off. So, that leaves me with this week to use my floating holiday. Well, looks like I'm not going into work Friday!