I’ll tell ya…kids today. I just had two people come to work for me on Monday. One of them has already requested four weeks of unpaid leave between now and the middle of July. The first two weeks will fuck up our training schedule (and unfortunately, HR knew about it before he was hired and nobody told me when I was making up the training schedule, so I couldn’t say no), and the second two weeks, although it’s after training is over, will probably mean we’ll have to recycle him for things he will have forgotten by then because he won’t have been on the job long enough to cement them in place. I don’t know yet if HR knew about the second two weeks or not, so I don’t know if I have to approve them or not. Given my druthers, I’d say no. [ETA: I misread HR’s note, and he did actually request the second two weeks when they hired him. Damn it.]
Back in the day, if I’d pulled that, I’d have been flatly told, “no.” What the hell is wrong with kids today? This shows absolutely no commitment or responsibility to me. You want a job that pays the big money, you toss your personal business to the side for awhile and commit.
Hell, the year I hired on, I felt odd about taking the week between Christmas and New Years to travel out of state to a fraternity conference only 6 weeks after I reported to work. If I hadn’t planned to go and bought airline tickets and reserved a hotel room months before, I probably would have given it a pass. Kids today apparently don’t even give it that much thought.