My SPOTD of the day is somewhat anonymous today, mainly because I don’t know who made the decision to keep me living on air alone. My adventure, like so many, begins with the red tape of the University.

I was employed during the first half of the year on a casual pay basis, for which I lodged forms detailing hours of work, and the pay came through on a fortnightly basis. On 15th July, I changed to a permanent staff payment due to the new job, and the pay is also supposed to come fortnightly. The Uni pay system works by paying casual staff and permanent staff on alternative weeks, so that in any month, the payments go :

Week 1 : casual staff
Week 2 : permanent staff
Week 3 : casual staff
Week 4 : permanent staff

This allows everyone to get fortnightly payments spread over a weekly basis as far as the Uni is concerned. All well and good so far.

Due to the change in my pay fortnight, it was decided to hold off on my casual pay packet one week, and to pay me in the permanent pay in the following week. That was fine with me - I could survive for a week without income due to savings in the bank. Unfortunately, that’s where it all unravelled.

Earlier this year, it took me 3.5 weeks to get paid because, among other things, a form was lost in the internal mail system. I decided to get around that possibility by simply walking the form over myself and lodging it personally, which is allowed for anyone, but obviously takes more work than just popping it into the internal mail. Despite this effort, it took over 9 days for the form to be processed, and so the first pay period was missed.

At this point, the person processing the payment must have decided that they could simply roll the pay into the next pay period. Never mind the fact that the casual pay had been rolled into the permanent pay beforehand, so I was not receiving any income at all. To make matters worse, I did not receive my casual pay this week because I am now a permanent staff member and the income is tied to that fortnightly system.

Due to the timing of the payments now, I will receive my casual pay earned in the first week of July and three weeks worth of permanent pay in one lump sum. I am getting the money, I guess, which is better than a kick in the head, but due to the slow processing and stupid decision made to hold my casual pay, it means that I was last paid on 3rd July, and will not receive any income until the middle of next week when the permanent pay is delivered - 5 WEEKS BETWEEN PAYMENTS.

Naturally, due to the fact that I have been “earning” money at the University, the dole for both of us was cut off, because I was “earning” too much to continue to receive welfare payments, so the past month has been just a barrel of laughs all round with no income whatsoever. Whoever made the decision that it would be okay to not pay someone for five weeks needs to have their pay cut off for the same time period to see how they like it…*grr*

The appropriate person(s) in HR wins my SPOTD award for this little funny game.

Trav.

PS: The HR response to how this could have happened is that they “don’t know, but it’s funny in a way, isn’t it?”. Um, no. It really isn’t. Not surprising they don’t know what’s going on since, in the process of transferring my call to the relevant person in another HR section, I was transferred to a Chemistry laboratory telephone which meant I had to hang up and call back HR again…*mutter mutter*

Categories: SPOTD