Blogtrek

Annual Leave Wars

Yesterday I got my paycheck and found that I had been charged for 9 more hours of leave than I had asked for. I had emailed my supervisor and her secretary several times that I was going to have Dec 30 be my regular day off, part of a 5-4 plan where I work 9 days of 9 hours each instead of 10 days of 8 hours in two weeks. I had intended to change the regular day off in the middle of the month, but for some reason they changed it at the end of the last month and charged me with 9 hours leave when I wanted a regular day off there. It seems that they want the official leave form instead of emails. A case of inflexible bureaucracy. But it gets worse. I had received an award of 16 hours off, and wanted to take 27 hours off to go to a conference. So I told them I wanted to take 11 hours of annual leave and 16 hours of award. But it seems they can't divide 16 by 9. It's true, 9 won't go into 16 evenly. So therefore I was going to take 9 hours of annual leave the first day, 2 hours of annual leave and 7 hours of award the next day, and 9 hours of award the last day. They could not get that second day straight.

My wife's workplace is no better. She works part time, so in 2 weeks she works 5 full-time days. This workplace can't do a 2 and 5 rhythm very well. For a while she worked 2 days one week and 3 the next, which is the same as 16 hours one week and 24 the next. That's reasonable. But the payroll people insist else Kingdom Come that each week must contain 20 hours of work. So now she is working one 4-hour day each week. She now goes to work 6 days instead of 5 in 2 weeks, with the same number of work hours, but spending more personal hours commuting, and consuming more oil.

It seems that mathematics is one discipline not well understood in today's society and we suffer because of it. By the way, did I say that 9 days of 9 hours was the same as 10 days of 8 hours above? That's 81=80. That doesn't match very well, but unless we can think of 81=80 at times, most of our music would never exist; see, for example, http://sonic-arts.org/dict/syncom.htm. At work they do let me have one hour off every two weeks.