So they always say you should examine your first paystub of the year carefully — especially if you get yours electronically — to make sure that new benefits and deductions are all being done correctly. Since my group gets intimately involved in the benefits programming and the general goofiness of working with benefits vendors, I can certainly echo that recommendation strongly.
So I got a bit of a frisson of OMG! when I pulled the electronic paystub site my company has and saw that my pay for the first two weeks of January was lower than it was the last two weeks of December. Yikes!
Fortunately, it was just because I had maxed out my Social Security contributions last year, so they were starting up again as of this paycheck. All else is well. But that’s excitement I don’t need on a Friday.
My favourite paystub gaffe was a triple-threat: it was my first massive overtime cheque paid out by direct deposit for the first time including my very first raise.
My salary jumped from $7 to $8 an hour, which was great at the time but paltry to what showed up on that triple-threat pay stub: $87/hour!
The kicker was that when I went to Payroll, I didn’t go to point out the error in the pay rate, but to complain at what I thought was a lower total. You see, I didn’t notice how many digits were on the left of the decimal point – I was expecting three digits, so I saw three digits and complained when the numerals were lower than I expected.
(This may explain why I’m not the accountant in the family.)
Ha!