Future Paychecks: The Problem I Didn’t Anticipate
July 17, 2006
I’ve never been very good at the Zen mentality. In fact, I’m an obsessive obsessive. So when I’ve seemingly achieved balance or established a system, the very first thing I do is poke holes in the whole thing or find new problems to obsess over. At the very least, when I’m anticipating change, I dream up all sorts of disastrous scenarios. A sort of negativity-warding, you know, like reverse psychology on the universe at large, even though it just sounds like self induced migraines and ulcers. Naturally, when I last talked about my work situation (where’s my raise/promotion?!?), I had imagined all kinds of terrible possibilities that would unfold instead of the best-case scenario. (In case you’re wondering, I try not to have one in mind. Just a rough idea of what would be nice, hypothetically speaking.) Of all the problems I had dreamed up, I hadn’t expected THIS.
Sunday nights we receive an emailed version of our paystub that will be deposited the coming Wednesday. This generally reminds me that we’re getting paid this week and gets me all riled up about which bills should be scheduled and when. This is my need to obsess over minutiae; I can’t just let the Rube Goldbergian construct run itself.
I knew that there was some issue with the processing of timecards because the first two days of the pay period were the last two days of the fiscal year. Our payroll coordinator couldn’t explain what ramifications this would have but I didn’t think anything of it. Last night, I found that this Wednesday’s paycheck shall have in it, two sets of regular time and overtime, at two different rates!
Apart from adding up to an astronomically high number of hours in two weeks (209!), it shows that two days worth were paid at my normal rate and the others were haphazardly paid at [a paltry] 5% more (50 cents anyone?) And none of the hours quite fit the calculated totals I had online — 2.5 hours of overtime and 21.5 hours of regular time in two days? 46.5 hours of overtime? 118 hours of regular time? In eight days??
It just doesn’t really quite make sense. I’m definitely not going to just hold on to it and hope that they never come after me for it; I would not want to take that large a hit further down the road as it’s rather a substantial amount. But who would have thought that I’d get blindsided because of an increase?
By the way, speaking of being blindsided by an increase, if that IS my raise? 5%? They’d better be kidding. After 6 months of newbie service I got a 6% raise, after another 8-10 months of ridiculously dedicated work I’d better be getting a higher raise than that!
