I'm on the (non-sports related) List!

There comes a time in everyone's life when they want to be on a list. To get into a club. To win tickets for a Red Sox/Yankees game. To meet a celebrity. My list is not so ambitious. I just wanted to be on the list to receive a paycheck.

I have been contracting at my company for three months and I promised myself that I would not pull a Jeff Hardy and screw up my chance to get the Big Push. It worked, and on March 1st I was hired (YAY, Cam!). But in the world of corporate America nothing is ever that easy. I think I may have come across the dumbest HR person in the world to handle my hiring. This woman would make the airline representative who talks to David Spade in "Tommy Boy" look like a genius ("Hi, I'm Earth, have we met?" " I don't think so").

It started in my first meeting with her. She supplied me with all the paperwork to fill out and I asked her about how quickly my medical insurance would kick in since I had some things that needed to be taken care of quickly. She informed me that it would take 24-48 hours after the paperwork was submitted to get a number I could use, and 7-10 days later to get the actual card. This sounded fine with me. But then I heard no follow-up. Three days later I asked where my medical info was. No response. Then a week later, I asked again and was told that now she would submit my paperwork. Not when I first asked about it. Or even the second time, but now when it was getting close to me having to reschedule appointments!

The second hit was that since I am starting in March my vacation time gets prorated. Makes sense. I get 15 days and 3 personals. This is a total of 18. Missing 2 months means I lose 1/6 of those days or 3 days so I should have 15 total (always good at math as I may have mentioned when discussing Hockey East playoff combinations last week). But somehow I was only down for 13.5 days. HUH? Apparently, since I did not start on the 1st (which was a Saturday!) I was not counted has having worked in the month of March. When I asked my dim-witted HR person about this she said that the system calculates on the 1st of the month. I asked, "Wasn't the 3rd (first business day) effectively the first of the month?" I was told "No" because the first was a Saturday. So I asked if that meant even though I am working the entire business month of March that I was not getting credit for that and was losing 3 months of the year for vacation day calculation. Dim-wit said, "Yes". I informed her in my best sarcasm, "That makes sense." And she agreed. Apparently they don't teach sarcasm at Dim-wit's school. Come to find out I just needed a special override to get past the auto calculation of the system but she was not going to tell me that.

To get into my building you need an access card. Since I started working as a contractor I have been using essentially a visitor's pass. Once I was in the system, HR was supposed to notify Facilities and I would then get a real employee pass. They moved my boss and I in my building and when I spoke with the Facilities Manager he had no idea I had even been hired (this was of course a week and a half after filling out my paperwork). So no notification email had ever been sent. In addition, I have had to bypass HR to get set up on the various employee related systems are work (IT & A/P reimbursement).

So, you can see how I was expecting not to receive a paycheck today (today being the first pay period since my hire). I got news the checks were in. I rushed down to the front desk reception and while she was not handing them out yet, I saw she had a list. This list showed all the people who have checks sent. What did I see, my name emblazoned on the page. I was on the List!!! I WAS ON THE LIST!!! Apparently miracles happen and not just at Lake Placid.