Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Surprisingly Equitable

I woke up this morning at around 7:00, without any assistance from the loud-mouthed drama queen who’s woken me up the past two days, though I didn’t end up staying awake.
Instead I went back to sleep until just before 9:00, at which point I got up, threw my contacts in, and went for my four-mile walk.
Upon my return I made my protein shake, then took a shower.
In the afternoon I had to go in to work for a meeting of my department.
We have these meetings periodically, as they’re pretty much the only times we can actually get everyone together to discuss current and upcoming process changes, and to hash out any complaints. It also gives those of us who work the weekend shifts a little bit of “face time” with our upper management.
In fact, short of having the CEO of the company there, pretty much the very top of upper management was at the meeting. For the past two years or so he’s been the VP of our department, but a recent change in the organizational structure has bumped him up a notch, so he’s more or less the person with ultimate direct authority over us.
Sure, there are a couple of people above him, but they don’t really get involved in our specific operations.
In any case, he gave us a little pep talk, answered some questions, then ducked out, and we got on with our usual “housecleaning” activities.
One of the things mentioned during the meeting was that a study had been performed in order to determine how equitably employees at our company were being compensated compared across departments within the company and with employees in similar positions at other companies.
The end result was that some employees needed to have their compensation levels bumped up a little in order to achieve parity.
During the meeting I was sitting next to Scott. I noticed that he was holding onto some letters, letters that looked like the sort of things we get from HR whenever we get promoted or receive our merit increases. As I knew that Scott wanted us to hang out after the meeting to talk to him, it was my hope that these letters indicated that we were among the employees receiving an adjustment.
Turns out that we were among the employees in need of an adjustment, and I have to say that it was a pretty substantial increase.
The increase doesn’t take effect in time for me to get an increase in my OT pay for this meeting (mandatory meetings equal a minimum of four hours of OT even if they don’t actually take four hours), but the timing is just right for the sixteen hours of OT I’ll be putting in next week when I take an HTML training class, so that’s very cool.
I actually live about thirteen miles from work. On weekend mornings, thanks to stoplights, it takes me about twenty minutes to drive in.
The meeting started, officially, at 1:00, but we were encouraged to be there for 12:30.
Allowing for traffic, I left a bit before noon, figuring I’d get there in about a half an hour.
Apparently, though, everyone in Loudoun County needed to be on the road at that exact minute, so, with the perpetual construction that’s taking place on the closest, non-toll road that takes me where I needed to go, after about a half an hour I was less than halfway there.
The flow of traffic, if it can be called a “flow,” was the paradoxical sort that moves when the light is red and stops when the light is green.
Realizing that I would be late if I stayed the course, as soon as I could I turned onto a road that led me to the Greenway, the privately owned and extremely expensive toll road.
Being willing to pay the premium was the only thing that allowed me to be on time for the meeting.
Of course, when I took my usual, much cheaper route home, I got hit with the “Low Balance” flash at the toll booth, meaning that my Smart Tag will need to be replenished, as I’ve used up $25 worth of the $35 balance I started out with. If I hadn’t taken the Greenway, that probably wouldn’t have happened for a few more days.
Once I got home I decided to cook an actual meal, but the whole chewing thing still isn’t my strongest suit, so it was kind of a hassle.
And that’s pretty much been my day. I’m probably going to try to do some drawing (most likely a picture of Jessica Simpson from that new video), but I may be back with another entry later.

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