'Now she won't be able to go [on vacation]': Pediatrician gets revenge on her trash-talking coworker by requesting competitive days off that she knew her coworker wanted

Your coworkers are switching from 'summer mode' into 'soup mode'. 

This means that the entire workforce is captivated by our next round of PTO–so that means we're starting to think about our vacation time for Christmas instead of days off for a tropical cruise. But the vacation dreams for a trash-talking coworker in our next story are already foiled before they could blossom, all because she got caught talking behind a fellow employee's back. 

Wafer-thin coworker relationships struggle to survive the holidays because of competitive PTO dynamics. When you work on a small team, you're forced to reckon with the reality that everyone's going to try and get the same days off to celebrate the same holidays. Every year, the workplace is flooded with PTO requests for the days leading up to Christmas or the Monday and Tuesday after Thanksgiving–so pretty much anything short of a company-wide shutdown will leave the workforce short-staffed. Managers are faced with these competitive PTO days and usually keep things on a first-come-first-serve basis. So when this pediatrician found out that her coworker was trash-talking her behind her back, she decided to get some petty revenge of her own by stealing the days she knew her coworker wanted to take off. 

With her vacation pre-booked, and no way to get those days off of work, now this bad-mouthing Betty might think twice before disrespecting anyone in the workplace.