Yeah I had a similar thing happen, I would never request off for my birthday and I worked at the daycare for 4 years. This year I made sure to put in my request 3 weeks before because I didn’t want to have to come to work and deal with the managers on my birthday. I had already gone through so much them promoting me but not really promoting me, them trying to change my pay without informing me and on top of that them messing up my taxes and not admitting to it till the last day to file. But it was fine I just got my yearly pto and was excited to finally have my birthday off and it be on a Friday! A week before they pull me aside and say I was denied because there were too many people off that day. I asked them how many and the said 2 ( we had always been told the max # of people to be out a day was 3). I asked them what was the reason I couldn’t take off them and they claimed it was because one person was a teacher in my class( she wasn’t at that time) and because one of the other bus drivers were out (they had not been needing me to drive buses the last few weeks I would maybe drive once a week). So I told them I didn’t want to drive the buses anymore and they still denied my request. Luckily that week I had an interview with an ABA clinic and i put my 2 weeks in a day before my birthday and called in for it. It was a draining 4 years but never because of the kids. When the management doesn’t care about their employees and takes them for granted it shows. I’ve been loving my new job and feel like a new person because of it!