ARTICLE 14 ANNUAL LEAVE SECTION 1 - GENERAL Annual leave is a right of the employee and not a privilege. Consistent with the needs of the Agency, annual leave, which is requested in advance, will be approved. It will be the responsibility of the supervisor, in consultation with the employee, to schedule annual leave to insure that annual leave is scheduled for use so as to prevent any unintended loss at the end of the year. When requested, employees will normally be advanced annual leave not to exceed the amount that can be accrued during the leave year. SECTION 2 - CONSECUTIVE VACATION TIME For vacation purposes, supervisors will attempt to schedule workloads and annual leave in a manner which will permit each employee, if he or she wishes, to request up to two consecutive weeks in each year. Approvals of such requests are subject to the needs of the agency. SECTION 3 - RESOLVING CONFLICT In the event of a conflict of annual leave scheduling among employees at a given duty station, Service Computation Date (SCD) will govern, in the absence of personal hardship. SCD will be used on a rotating basis. SECTION 4 - LEAVE USAGE INCREMENTS Annual leave may be used in increments of 15 minutes. SECTION 5 - EMERGENCY ANNUAL LEAVE To request emergency annual leave, an employee will contact the leave approving official as soon as possible, but normally no later than two (2) hours after the start of the Center's standard tour of duty. Normally, an employee is expected to personally contact the appropriate leave approving official to request emergency annual leave. Under unusual circumstances, a supervisor will accept such requests from an intermediary. However, if an employee makes repeated requests for emergency annual leave, he or she may be required to personally contact the appropriate leave approving supervisor with such requests.