I had put in vacation for 2 days to go back home for my grandpa’s bday 4 months in advance. Request gets accepted. 2 weeks before my vacation, there is a shift change and now my trip would take up a whole week of work. I inform my boss that I’ll be taking a whole week now, he tells me that’s fine and to go update the vacation request. I go to HR to update my request, instead of just changing the date range the HR person tries to delete the request and make a new one. Only problem is we were in a vacation blackout time (no new requests get accepted for that month because of workload), so they end up canceling my vacation and then go “oh whoops looks like you can’t put in a new request too bad”. My boss gets pissed and has my back but HR isn’t budging, not the first time our department has been screwed over. I tell HR “I’m still going on vacation. I’m not gonna miss out on seeing my family because you guys are incompetent. Fire me or don’t fire me, I don’t really care at this point.” My boss tells me to enjoy my time off and we can worry about stuff when I get back from break. Grandpa’s bday was great, had fun seeing the family and friends from back home. I come back after a week and I’m still employed. Boss and boss’s boss explained to HR that I’m the only one in our department who’s qualified to do what I do, and if they want to lose a bunch of money getting a 3rd party contractor to replace me than that’s their right to, they’ll just have to explain to the finance officer and general manager why we’d be bleeding money all of a sudden. I don’t work there anymore but I hope my old boss is doing well, he was a homie.
Side story, that same boss took 2 weeks of vacation when the Shadowlands expansion of WoW released. Man’s got his priorities straight haha. When I asked him what did he tell HR and his boss he was like “Those people don’t need to know what I do or don’t do with my vacation time, I’m taking my vacation time.”