k1dude wrote:Wow! 5 weeks after 15 years? All the companies I ever worked for gave you your 3rd week after 15. It took 25 years to get 4 weeks. But it was all moot anyway. None of them ever approved vacation for exempt management.
Not to add salt to the wound, but I misremembered: it was 5 weeks after 10 years. To explain, when I first joined the company it was little more than a start-up. The three founders were stand-up guys who would do anything for their workers, even dipping into their own pockets to advance money when it was tough to make the payroll. The pay was decent, the work was exciting as we were constantly breaking new ground, and when they couldn't give raises, they gave really nice stock options instead. The generous vacation time was an acknowledgment of the 70 -80 hour weeks everyone was putting in to get the company off the flight deck.
Well, it was the necessity of issuing stock for start-up money that killed the golden goose. The three founders decided to take the company private and so offered the vulture capitalists that held the majority shares an excellent price
in cash. Unfortunately the scam artist who eventually acquired us offered them $2.00 more per share, but in the form of a swap for stock in his company. Being the greedy pigs that they were, the vultures went for the bait (who wouldn't turn down a $20.00 bill today for the promise of $22.00 tomorrow, right?). Three months later, the stock they had taken in trade tanked to about 1/4 of its original value and they lost their shirts. So, my company was basically purchased with toilet tissue. Thankfully, I dumped my optioned shares on the day of the sale, so I was able to avoid the bloodbath that many of my co-workers fell into. They held on to their shares and even purchased more on margin, or funded by home equity loans. Naturally, they got murdered.
Since then, we've been passed around more often than a hooker at a sales convention. We've lost our identity and the spirit that made the company a desirable acquisition. Now we're just a cow to be milked by one absentee landlord after another.
