Only Those Without Babies Can Understand What It’s Like To Travel With Them

I’m currently on maternity leave, two or three months before I’m due back to work, and I realise that I still have a lot of vacation days left over. I ask a colleague who I should talk to about scheduling my vacations — there have been some personnel changes while I was gone — and she tells me to talk to [Superior #1]. She also tells me that technically, all vacation times had to be planned by last November — I was already on maternity then and it’s now June — which nobody told me about. No big deal since we don’t have any trips planned; I figure I’ll just talk to [Superior #1] and get some time off scheduled when nobody else is on vacation. Whatever works. 

I email [Superior #1], asking if I can come see her about when to schedule my time off. She emails me back saying, of course, I can come to the office about that. 

I make an appointment, take my baby with me, ride through half the city, and go to the office. 

When I arrive there, [Superior #1] greets me warmly, and then proceeds to tell me that while she can show me the schedule of who is going away when, I really need to talk to [Superior #2] about when I want to take my time off. 

I just stand there, flabbergasted, with my baby in a carrier, wondering why exactly she couldn’t have told me from the start that she wasn’t the person to talk to about that issue.