Vacation Time Adds Unneeded Buffer

When I come off of vacation time, it adds several hours to all my games' timers. Why does it do this? I came back, I'm ready to play, but I lose banked vacation time for no reason.

Maybe I'm screwing up, and there's some setting that I need to change---in which case, someone please tell me I'm an idiot and how to fix it. 

But if (as I suspect) it's automated and there's no way to prevent it from gobbling up more time than you need, it's a bad "feature" of vacation time that when you come off of it, it adds extra time to the timer (deducted from future vacation time).

Note: this might only be a "feature" for diamond members, related to the auto-vacation time that prevents forfeits. An appreciated feature, but still, why is it deducting hours of time when I resume?

When  you go on vacation 24 hours is automatcially used from you vacation allotment. If you return from a vacation before that 24 hours is up, the remaining time gets added to your games, up to the time control.

The 24 hour minimum is an abuse prevention technique and the remaining time being added to your games is a mechanism to prevent a large loss of overall time for people that were losing a lot of it to the 24 minimums when it was implemented.

https://support.chess.com/customer/portal/articles/1444787

I see. Thanks...

For the record, what "abuse" is this preventing? If I've got a week of vacation time, then I should get a week of vacation time. Forcing me to take them in 24 hour chunks only potentially slows things down. It's a stupid rule.

It's been a while but I think it had to do with people being on vacation, coming off briefly to make moves in a subset of their games then going back on vacation again.

How is that "abuse"? I mean, if you had a week of vacation time, and you were popping out of vacation time to make moves, it's not like you could get more than a week out of it for the games you weren't playing... there's too much regulation here. 

I that part of the idea is that vacation shouldn't just be used to extend time in some games. Adding the time means that if a similar process is used, then the person will at least run out of vacation after a while and can't continue that process.

I believe once you come off vacation, it automatically refreshes your clock. The anti-exploit in place is because people would otherwise spend 1 minute of vacation time, every day, to perpetually elongate a lost game. They still do, but not to the same extent.