Just to add an interesting sidebar to the discussion:

Accrued vacation time.

Our company was based in California and was privately owned. Under that owner, our vacation time was accrued. In other words if you didn't take all your vacation time in the year 1992, then those days were added to your available total for the year 1993. And so on.

Some people in the company didn't take vacations often and had accrued large amounts of vacation time, allowing them to do things like take two months off one year (after making sure that their projects could be covered by others in their abscence... they weren't jerks about it or anything).

Then, our company was purchased by a large multinational corporation based in the state of Michigan. We are still located in California, but we are now a branch office of a Michigan company.

Their vacation time policy is "use it or lose it". If you don't take all your vacation in the year 2001, you don't get to carry those days over to 2002.

It was my understanding that "use it or lose it" is actually illegal in the state of California. But they said it's legal for them to do it to us because of <some Klingon-worded legal reason I didn't understand>. They've got many dozens of branch offices in California already, and their main business is employment itself, so they definitely know their legal grounds well. I just think it's totally unfair.