Hope everyone had a nice 3 day weekend.
(Note: when I started this post I was pissed off… By the time I got to the end I was chuckling because this is so often typical of my life.)
I’m now on furlough instead of actually being layed off.
Here is a snippet of an email exchange with one of my co-workers. In re-reading it, I note that I’m pretty pissed off and it comes through loud and clear. I’d actually tried to tone it down a bit. Sheesh if this is toned down I wish I’d saved the original draft! I’d have made my Marine friends proud with the colorful use of swearing!
Furlough instead of layoffs is almost as bad as just continuing along the layoff course that they had chosen. This is FAR more stressful since YET AGAIN the company has thrown everyone into a state of uncertainty. I’m actually FAR MORE PISSED about this than anything else. I mean I’m supposed to hang out waiting for the 20th? Ooooo there may be an immediate start date but no one has a clue when? We ALL know we cant run our lives like this… Why does the company think they can run a business like this?
I’m angry because it appears that the company may well be simply maneuvering so that that can screw people out of their severance pay. I never did buy that BS line that billing no-work burned the employees severance.
I suspect that they may have found out they didn’t have a leg to stand on and all the sudden they’re looking at $$$ and have decided that they don’t want to cough up the bucks.
The real problem is the none of the retained employees will ever trust the management again. If those employees are smart they’ll go ahead and keep looking for something else. Either in another division or a completely different company. Most probably a competitor.
I don’t believe for a New York Minute that there is any project, or last minute save. I think that the 20th will come and go and then we’ll have the furloughs extended another 30 days then we’ll be out of work.
Everything they have done over the past 60 -90 days seems shadier and shadier with each change in direction. I firmly believe that something else is going on and that the company is not playing above board or dare I say it? Ethically?
I took the furlough because it extended my effective health care benefits. I figure the longer I can go without having to pay the outrageous COBRA rates the better…
I’ve just finished the process of filling out the unemployment forms online.
I anticipated that this process would be an extremely annoying process, something akin to having an old railroad tie shoved unceremoniously up my ass… So I put it off until today.
I didn’t want to go into the weekend in a sour mood because of the stupidity of dealing with bureaucratic crap.
Turns out… I made a good call!
The forms read like RAP. Did ya, ba dom ding, Diiid ya, ba dom ding ba dom ding Did ya, Did ya, Did ya. I pretty much HATE RAP! This form did a pretty good job of sending me off the deep end. Of course this was AFTER me spending 2 weeks trying to actually call Employment Development to find out if I was even eligible due to the furlough. The Employment Development Department is apparently so busy that they can’t even answer their phones.
I figured what the hell? I’ll fill out their forms online and then we’ll have a negotiation when one of their people CALLS me.
During the filling out of the forms I found out that my company had fucked us all in Oh, so subtle ways.
The Employment Development department asks this…
Provide your employment history for the past 18 months, including your very last employer. If you worked for a temporary agency, a labor contractor, an agent for actors, or an employer where wages are reported under a corporate name, your wages may have been reported under that employer name. You may want to refer to your check stub(s) or W-2(s) to obtain the name of your employer.
Note: Failure to report all your employers, periods of employment and wages correctly may result in your benefits being delayed or denied.
Employer Name Beginning Ending Wages How were you Paid?
(mm/dd/yyyy) (mm/dd/yyyy) Earned ($)
I read the question to mean, Put your employer name for the last 18 months. Well I’ve had the same employer since 2007 so the beginning date is 2007 and the ending date is 2011, pretty easy right???
But then the Wages question becomes inclusive of the whole beginning / ending period.
This leads me to try to come up with total YTD earnings for the past 5 year period. Which then leads me to discoveries about the lack of information and difficulty in obtaining it from my company.
First, they went “Green” so they have us all sign up for direct deposit. Then they tell us that the will not be sending paycheck statements any more and that we’ll have to look at our statements online.
Then they take the ability for us to look at our paycheck statements from our own computers at home away. Initially, we could print the statements in PDF format to a file so that we could keep offline copies for our records from our home computers. About a year ago the brilliant IT people did away with the PDF option, leaving only XPS.
Now the only way to see or get a copy of your paystub is by being connected directly to the company network and OH yeah it’s against the company policy for you to attach personal storage devices to your work computer so you have to store the image of the paystub as XPS, then email it to yourself, and it has to be zipped and encrypted.
The XPS format is great if you’re a windows user. But if you’re a Linux or Mac user… OH Well… you’re screwed because you’re different! You chose not to drink the Microsoft Kool Aid, your problem not ours. (I’ve since found viewers for Linux and Mac. and I know a couple of little tricks that have gotten me past this problem.)
The above is frustrating… But the kicker is when you finally work through all this other shit and look at your paystubs. The magic works, the page is viewable and you find that most don’t have YTD information. In fact only one year in the past 5 actually has the YTD data.
Ya just want to throttle someone. GRRRRRRRR!
I ended up pulling what tax records I have (lost all the records in a fire in 2008) and having to call the accountant for other records. For the rest of the information, I had to open each and every paystub and manually add the information that I needed.
All of which just fed my frustration…
At one point, in my efforts to answer this single question (EDD wouldn’t let you move on if it was blank) I had 3 computers up and running and more total computing horsepower at my fingertips than was used to send men to the moon.
Don’t ask.. it just worked out that way.
If you ever had any doubt that I’m a QA person…
All you need to know is that this kind of thing happens to me all the time. The absolutely simplest thing turns into a raging furball.
It’s as if I just notice stuff others don’t.
Or else the Gremlins of our high technology world seem to really enjoy messing with me…
Maybe I need to make a Gremlin repellant and then retire to a tropical island.
Me, the Ocean, a nice hut, and no freakin technology… Except the boat would sink with me on it, in sight of the island…