'Approve my 1-week PTO or accept my 2-week notice': Boss denies IT employee's vacation request until he trains the new hire on a decade worth of experience, employee refuses and submits his resignation instead

There better be a good reason why a boss would deny an employee's rightfully earned PTO request. After all, vacation time is an essential benefit of employment. Managers should not have any say as to when it's convenient for them to allow employees to utilize their own much-deserved entitlements. 

Of course, some employment contracts include malleable language regarding the approval process of a PTO request. Let's all acknowledge the truth that this kind of vague language is never used in favor of the employee; rather, it's always management and the company at large that are protected by language such as that. 

As for this employee, he had been working as the go-to individual in the company's makeshift IT department for over a decade. When he submitted a vacation request for a week off, his new boss suddenly took the opportunity to create conflict over it. The boss not only rejected the request outright, but then he insisted that the employee train a new hire regarding his decade-spanning knowledge of IT and then he just might get that vacation request approved.

Naturally, this was not what the employee wanted to hear nor was this a feasible task for one person to teach on top of his long list of currents responsibilities on the job. Despite numerous efforts to explain why this was unfair, the author's boss would not relent. So, the employee left his office and returned with the only thing that made sense: his resignation.