Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Huh. Interesting. I didn’t know Canada still used cheques like that. Ive heard a Canadian talking about how they never carry cash and just use their card everywhere, which I can’t get away with even in London so I thought Canada would be even further along than us with that kinda stuff.
Yep, I’m in Canada, and as such so are my meatspace social groups.
—
I’m not so sure that “widespread use of electronic paycheques” and “being able to make all consumer purchases with a card” are sufficiently similar things that any society with one can be assumed to have the other.
—
Whether you can get away with not carrying cash here depends on your lifestyle and risk tolerance. I work in fast food, and every once in a while the card-reader part of the system will break or glitch, and usually at least two people per outage will have to leave because without a card reader they can’t pay. A while back someone had her credit card declined and didn’t have anything else on her, and ended up abandoning the food we’d already made. (The assistant manager told me I might as well keep it, and I brought it home and fed it to Mom. (It was not a food I personally like.))
((Although to be fair, I think part of the problem in that last case was that she was embarrassed by the decline and fled. She was holding a smartphone in her other hand, and given twenty seconds to think over the options we might have been able to arrange some smartphone-mediated payment method. It would have been worth a shot, at least.))
—
We don’t have pennies here anymore and instead round cash (and only cash) transactions to the nearest 5c, which (perhaps unintentionally) actually gives you an *incentive* to use cash in some edge cases. Like, if you buy something that’s 52c and give them two quarters, you’ve gotten almost a 4% discount, better than what you’d get from credit-card cashback. I often pay cash when buying from my own workplace for this reason.
(before you ask “since when does *anything* these days cost only 52c”: the employee discount is quite large, and some of our items are quite small)
—
Note that while I routinely *receive* cheques (just got one today, in fact), I literally never *write* them. I don’t even own any.
I won a small scholarship a while ago and they wanted a void cheque in order to send me the money (it was *not* the kind where the money goes directly to the school), and I went to the bank and asked about it. The teller told me that a: cheques are extremely expensive for the lower-tier account that I have (like $50 a pack, I think she said?), and b: there’s no need for a void cheque to literally be a cheque these days, here, have a pre-authorized debit form. (The scholarship people accepted it, and so did the bank I later opened a savings account with that wanted to see a cheque in order to do cross-bank account linking.)
Tags:
#long post #reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #adventures in University Land
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Current company issues physical paystubs as backup for the direct deposit amount, and my side business uses QuickBooks payroll, which lets you log in to see your paycheck.
Even when I worked for the state, I got a physical pay stub.
And the job after that had an (admittedly painful to use) portal that you could log in to to see your statements.
I think with the most recent tale of woe (two days ago, friend who works for a mid-tier Canadian grocery chain), in *theory* she was supposed to be able to log in to see her pay statements, but the portal wouldn’t accept her login credentials and nobody would fix it.
(It may be worth noting that out of the dozens of jobs various friends have had over the twelve years I’ve been here, *very* few even *tried* to obey labour laws. I think that at the moment, I’m the only person I know IRL (not counting coworkers, of course) who actually gets meal breaks.)
Tags:
#adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #in which Brin has a job #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
Boss has been at the [out of state] office since last Friday, which means that they’re printing the physical checks for our weekly AP run there. And….this is really silly, but I do miss doing that part. Printing, folding, envelope stuffing. It’s an easy, pleasant, meditative task that mentally marks the end of my week.
Silly because accounts payable is definitely the most basic and data-entry-oriented part of my job, but dammit, I like having the harder stuff punctuated with pleasingly tactile admin work!
I did a lot of secretarial stuff in high school. I was very good at it, I liked it, and I got a lot of praise for it. It’s a bit nostalgic.
I love doing payroll, I love the way you just have to [ presses button marked “payroll” and the machine automatically transfers the appropriate amounts electronically and emails out payslips and notifies the tax office ]
Usually you do, because that way you can be sure stuff like reimbursable expenses for the month (if they were filed already) are in the system and you have the ability to delay pushing the button for a few hours if there are some last-minute changes to be made (not ideal, but happens).
Having a button also makes to possible to gather around one desk every month as a team and chant “press the button, press the button” at whomever is responsible for that action currently. And then go for drinks or smth.
Current job is more involved than some systems I’ve seen because the accounting module sucks and was clearly just pasted on top of an otherwise mostly-functional industry-specific ERP.
Takes me 1-3 hours.
This is a very weird conversation to me, because among my meatspace social group the ones who get paid electronically are like “it’s a nightmare, they won’t let me log in to see my pay statements, I’m just supposed to trust that they sent me the right amount, it took me two months of complaining and escalating to superiors to even get a *tax form* out of them (and then my taxes were late)”, and the ones who get paper are like “yeah, it’s fine, it was a bit annoying at first having to go to the bank every fortnight but then I learned how to use mobile cheque deposit”.
(I know that you guys are taking the perspective of the one sending out the payments rather than the one receiving them, but still.)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #in which Brin has a job #(ftr I’m one of the paper ones)
Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:
1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.
2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.
3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.
4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.
5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.
…wait, did you guys never lie awake at night as kids wondering what breathing would feel like if you didn’t *need* to do it
practicing holding your breath, partly to expand the *total* length of time you can hold it but also to try to expand the time length of the initial segment, of neither breathing nor feeling the lack
(though all too aware that feeling it for a few seconds at a time is probably a very different experience from feeling it indefinitely, from *knowing* that you can feel it indefinitely)
—
(I remember I started at a total length of around thirty seconds and managed to work my way up to about sixty, maybe sixty-five. I haven’t practised in ages, but just now I tried it and was able to do sixty seconds on the first try, and might have been able to squeeze a few more seconds out of it. Is it like riding a bike? Does puberty do something to increase your lung capacity relative to your oxygen consumption?)
Tags:
#Twilight #death tw #asphyxiation cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #my childhood #(for anyone with their proofreader goggles on or otherwise paying close enough attention to notice: #there are two different spellings of the verb form of ”practise” in this post and both of them are deliberate) #(child!me spoke American and adult!me speaks Vaguely Canadian Mishmash) #((although I did start experimenting with Canadian spelling fairly young #–I knew from the age of 8 that one day I would live in Canada– #and that time period probably did overlap)) #((but I think ”practise” was among the later ones I adopted)) #(((I started off with ”favourite” and ”colour”))) #tag rambles #our home and cherished land #(((also I played a lot of Neopets and Runescape so some Britishisms leaked through from there))) #(((but there was definitely an aspect of ”I’m going to have to get used to it someday and might as well start now”))) #language
You, the queen of a fairy tale kingdom, got cursed to give birth to a princess who’s going to live her life isolated in a tower the first 20 years of her life. Narrate how you avoid your daughter’s fate.
She laughed, when she placed the curse on me. Laughed and laughed. She called me a fool for coming to her, for wanting children who would sap my strength and steal my power.
One child to take my kingdom, she promised me. Well, I’d wanted an heir. It didn’t have to be a curse.
One child the sea would steal. There was room in that. They didn’t have to die, only to love the sea. I would buy the finest ships.
And the third would suffer my grandmother’s fate.
The tower.
Grandmother told me stories about that tower, shuddering. About the isolation almost driving her mad. About the desperate longing for escape. I know what that escape cost her, and my grandfather as well, with his scarred face and limping gait.
That was going to be difficult.
The sorceress’s curse worked. Within the year, I held my first babe in my arms, a sturdy boy who kicked and cried and cuddled against his mother as if he hadn’t been made only to bring me grief. Well, all mothers grieve.
A character that only ever describes themselves as half-human. They never clarify on what the other half is, even when pressed, and gets insulted that it isn’t already obvious to the other pcs.
Bonus Points: The other half is also human
Tags:
#fun with loopholes #story ideas I will never write #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
All the Vulcans are fiercely protective of the ‘fragile, illogical, prone-to-danger, smart, reckless little human’.
To make the human feel more accepted (as it is only logical) the Vulcans try to include aspects of terran culture in the ship’s day-to-day life, failing spectacularly at it.
@jvlianbashir THAT’S A GOOD END TO THAT EPISODE THOUGH…
the vulcans put together awful, bland decorations. they make a cake because it’s of “significant importance”. they go through the process of putting together this party and Studying this Human Ritual and the entire episode is setting up to what you KNOW will be a horrible result. they do a bad job!!
then when the human’s birthday comes, and they reveal the off-the-mark, underwhelming looking birthday bash, the human just. starts crying. because they had no idea their crew would go through all this trouble to celebrate their birthday, and even put up DECORATIONS, or make a CAKE, and there’s a birthday card with extremely polite impersonal messages written and a hundred perfectly tidy signatures.
and the vulcans are just standing around like “you appear upset. the Birthday Party was unsatisfactory”.
“Humans require regular physical contact to remain healthy. We have a weekly rotation for The Daily Shoulder Pat. Please inform us if this is insufficient contact, either in frequency, magnitude, or duration.”
Brinens and Things 