some of you folks seem to have the rough end of the management holiday planner stick 
I'm a programmer, I work in the IT department of the UK arm of a pretty big manufacturing company. We have an IT Director, 1 helpdesk guy, 1 operations guy, and me & two other developers.
We make doors - in Europe, Israel, N & S America, S Africa and the far east; we also make cubicles here in the UK.
Our IT team covers the UK (2 factories & 1 sales office), Czech Republic (IT Manager only, 1 factory), Poland (see Czech Rep); coming on stream in the next 12 months we also have Hungary (2 sites) and Ireland (1 site).
We 3 UK developers do all software development and implementation work for all the European plants; the 2 French developers look after all the development work for all 8 of their sites, but we have to do Quality Control on their work.
We never struggle to get the holidays we want, aside from the helpdesk guy & the ops guy can't be off at the same time, and at least 2 of us developers should be in the office at any one time (although we can have 2 off at the same time for the odd day or two).
In addition we get all bank holidays off, all weekends and a complete shutdown from 24th December until the first working day of the new year.
There's a lot of work for us to do, but we do generally get the holidays we want (first come first served of course) and we don't need to plan 2 years ahead like some of you poor sods
Life could be worse
