The Requested Day Off

A while back, when I worked in corporate America, asking to take PTO felt like committing a crime. Not a petty crime either — not jaywalking or forgetting to return a library book. No, this was full-on felony-level audacity.

You’d walk into your manager’s office (or worse, send that carefully worded email) with the nervousness of someone pleading their case before a judge. “Hi, um, I was wondering if I could maybe, possibly, if it’s not too much trouble, take two days off… six weeks from now?” And then you’d sit there waiting for the verdict like you just asked for their firstborn child.

The reactions were always priceless. Some managers looked at you like you’d just confessed to robbing the company safe. Others tilted their heads, squinted, and muttered the corporate classic: “We’ll have to see if the business can support that.” As if your absence for 48 hours would single-handedly tank the stock price and send Wall Street into chaos.

God forbid you asked for time off during a “critical business period” — which, in corporate terms, is every period. January? Year-end wrap-up. February? New fiscal year kickoff. March? Q1 deadlines. April? Tax season. May? Planning for Q2. June? Mid-year reviews. July? “Busy summer months.” August? “Preparing for Q3.” September? Budget planning. October? Pre-holiday rush. November? Holiday rush. December? “End of year critical closeout.” Translation: you may rest when you’re dead.

And the paperwork. Oh, the paperwork. You’d fill out forms, submit requests in the HR portal, get three signatures, and offer a blood sample. Then you’d wait while your request slowly moved through an approval chain longer than the credits of a Marvel movie. By the time it came back “approved,” your vacation was already over.

But the real kicker was the guilt trip. Managers loved to remind you: “Well, if you’re gone, someone else will have to pick up the slack.” Translation: enjoy your beach day while Linda in Accounting curses your name for not being there to answer emails about Q3 variance reports.

And then, the pièce de résistance: coming back from PTO. You’d return to an inbox with 742 unread emails, half marked “urgent.” People would greet you with, “Glad you had fun, but we really missed you around here.” Translation: we survived without you just fine, but now we’re going to punish you for daring to leave.

So yeah, PTO in corporate America was less like “paid time off” and more like “permission to briefly step away while feeling crippling guilt.” You didn’t relax. You didn’t unwind. You just relocated your stress to a different zip code.

The irony? These same companies would brag about their generous PTO policies in job postings: “We offer 15 days of vacation!” What they don’t tell you is that actually taking those 15 days requires the stealth of a jewel thief, the negotiating skills of a hostage negotiator, and the luck of winning the lottery.

And yet, we still asked. Because deep down, we clung to the hope that maybe, just maybe, we deserved a break. Spoiler alert: we did. We always did.

Looking back now, I realize PTO wasn’t just a benefit — it was a loyalty test. Could you survive on the crumbs of work-life balance long enough to prove your dedication? And if you dared to ask for more? Well, prepare for the side-eye, the sighs, and the whispered accusations of not being a “team player.”

Corporate America treated vacation requests like classified secrets. But here’s the truth: taking time off never made anyone less valuable. If anything, it proved we were human. And last I checked, even “high-performing associates” need a nap.