My toxic job is always demanding that I work through every vacation I ever receive.

So I decided to get some petty revenge by literally following the letter of the law and using all of my PTO throughout the rest of the year,

leaving my toxic managers in a pinch where for the first time they actually had to do their job.

Here's how I did it.

Okay, so this happened a couple years ago at my old job.

This was a pretty demanding corporate gig where we were always juggling tight deadlines,

constant emails, and way too many meetings that easily could have been Slack messages.

Around early November, human resources sent out one of those all-staff emails with a bright red banner and an urgent tone.

It read something like this.

Reminder, all unused PTO must be taken before December 31st. We will not be

allowing rollovers this year. Please schedule your remaining days immediately or risk losing them all.

And this was with no exceptions, no flexibility, and no consideration for project deadlines.

Now, I wasn't one to take a ton of time off during the year, mostly because every time I tried,

something urgent would come up and I would just get guilted into postponing it.

So by November, I had 10 full days of paid time off just sitting there.

And according to Human Resources, big red warning, I had about six weeks to use them.

Now, naturally, I did what any burnt-out, unappreciated worker would do.

I opened the calendar and I booked myself off from December 18th to December 31st. Two full weeks. Right before New Year's smack in the middle of the most chaotic time in our project cycle. A week later, my manager, let's call him Rob, came to me in a mild panic. Rob said to me, hey, I saw your PTO request and I was hoping we could shift that a little. December's going to be a critical time for the project, and we really need all hands on deck. I then said to him, yeah, I get that, but HR literally just sent out that PTO deadline. If I don't use those days, then I lose them all. And I've already worked through enough vacations this year. He looked uncomfortable, but couldn't argue with the logic. I even forwarded him the

human resources email with a subject line saying, using my days as required. Well, he escalated to

human resources and of course, they replied by saying, we understand that it may be inconvenient,

but our PTO policy is final. Managers are responsible for planning around employee availability.

And seriously, that reply felt like

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