Winning The Lottery
My day job is in a hospital working about fifteen hours a week. It’s a balancing act between how few hours I can do to keep our finances ticking over while not slowing up work on the next novel.
At least that’s the theory.
In practice my employers will go to extraordinary lengths to delay paying their staff.
For a three day week, I have to complete no less than twenty-seven data entries on a time-sheet; my name, NI number, employee number, and for each day the date, start time, end time, break, total hours worked, and location. On top of that my boss has to complete four more entries for each day worked.
If any of them are omitted or filled in incorrectly in any way, my pay for that week is delayed while the query is resolved. Furthermore, the complexities of our National Insurance scheme mean that if I get two weeks pay in one week, and none in the other, rather than pay in both weeks, I lose about £10.50 per time. Furthermore, if anyone else makes an error, or there delays because of the internal post, I again lose out.
Then they decided to cut all lines of communication apart from a web form that can only be filled in on the employer’s intranet site.
On at three occasions this year my pay has been delayed because of my own errors — but on another four occasions it’s been delayed by someone else’s mistake or procedural change.
That means that fifteen per cent of my pay has been delayed by a week.
Sometimes I feel that I’d be better off doing the lottery. Sometimes when I get paid, it feels as if I’ve won the lottery.
