3 January 2002

Well, here I am at work. Only about a half-hour late, which means if I want to get eight hours in today, I can't leave any earlier than 4.

I'm not worrying about it overmuch, though. If I decide to leave early, I'll make it up tomorrow, or next week, or I'll spend a few hours of leave. There are five inches of snow on the ground collected in the last eight hours or so, and it's not likely to stop snowing until sometime tonight.

To be honest, I wouldn't be even a half-hour late if I hadn't laid in bed so long this morning, pissing and moaning about the necessity of getting up and digging out.

Not that I did much digging. I cleared the snow off my car, but Matt's the one who shovelled the driveway off.

I was standing on the porch, shaking the snow off my coat and watching him shovel, when he stopped and looked at me. "Even in the Frozen North," he said, "it is customary for the person who is not shovelling to wait indoors. The moral support is understood."

So I went inside. (Though I'm thinking that in the Frozen North, a home might have more than one snow shovel. But I wasn't about to try to help him with a gardening spade.)

My company just changed payroll and accounting systems. There were a few glitches.

The old system used our four-digit employee IDs. The new one uses our six-digit IDs, which isn't too bad, because the six-digit ID is "49" plus the four-digit ID.

Except.

The reason there are two different IDs, see, is that the new, six-digit numbers were assigned when we merged with another company. Some of us generated duplicate ID numbers using the "49" -plus-old-ID system. So we were assigned new ones.

Unfortunately, my new six-digit ID number is not the ID number on my badge, probably because the badges were generated by hand (by someone who didn't bother to check to verify the conversion for each person). So I spent about four hours yesterday trying to log in to the new timecard processing site using a bogus ID.

I figured out what had gone wrong entirely by accident, when - looking for something else entirely - I stumbled across a memo nearly two years old mentioning the new ID number. (We still use the four-digit number internally, see, so I hadn't bothered memorizing the six-digit one.)

Then, when I finally got logged in and sorted out how the system works, I checked my leave balance. Not actually on a whim, because one of the guys next door said his leave had been messed up.

Whaddya know? The database tells me I have just short of 20 hours of leave.

This is Wrong.

I had over 90 hours of leave before I left for Christmas vacation. I used five days' leave while I was gone. Forty from ninety is fifty.

The guy across the hall says he thinks leave was deducted twice. Eighty from ninety is ten... Plus about five hours or so gained for the new pay period... Yeah, that's about right.

BUT! The pay stub I received in the mail yesterday (and I'm not trusting that the direct deposit actually happened until tomorrow, when I check with the bank) says I have negative 35 hours of leave. The pay stub and the database don't even match!

That's not even counting the fact that the database shows me as having no holiday leave available for the year.

Our HR person gave me a name and a phone number, but the person I am supposed to talk to is out of the office. I left her a detailed phone message. I will leave her another detailed phone message today, and every business day that she doesn't return my call.

My request for vacation in April was approved by my manager, and I'd darned well better have my leave back in time to take it!

--Liz