in which Brin has a job

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

 

brin-bellway:

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

@rustingbridges​​ replied:

are masks not mandatory in your region? my area is mixed politically but last time I was at the grocery store I saw one person not wearing a mask (out of maybe 50-100 people)                            

God, I fucking wish.

*Overall* I think Canada has been handling this better than America (though it’s certainly no South Korea or anything), and overall the Ontario conservative government has been fairly competent (certainly relative to American conservatives), but they are not pushing masks anywhere *near* hard enough.

My last five-hour shift, I was literally the *only* person wearing a mask. I saw a co-worker (the one who made fun of me the first couple times I showed up masked, and you *bet* your ass I isolated a clip of that for when I’m no longer dependent on this place for food money and can afford to rat them all out to corporate [link]) *carrying* a surgical mask on her way out of the store, but she didn’t wear one on duty. Not one customer was masked.

A couple shifts previously a pair of (non-masked) people walked in, looked at the menu for a minute or two, and walked back out, and the franchise owner insinuated that they’d left because I’d scared them off with my mask-wearing. (Though it’s a good sign that he’s stuck to insinuations: it suggests that he doesn’t think he can get away with overtly telling me not to wear it, that he *believes* I’m in the right, even if he doesn’t like it.) (Also, the customers–actual customers, who actually bought stuff, they’re not your customers by right just because they walked into your store dude–immediately before *and* after that pair *were* masked.)

A shift or two before that a (non-masked, age maybe fifties or sixties) customer tried to *commiserate* with me over “having” to wear a mask and gloves at work: I told her that while the *gloves* were mandatory (they always have been), “masks are not mandatory, but they didn’t *stop* me”, and she made some backtracking noises about “whatever makes you feel safer”. (You know what would make me feel safer? If *you* were wearing a mask. Surgical masks have saved my bacon–including against pathogens–too many times for me to ever believe the claims that they’re *useless* for the wearer, but I’ll absolutely believe the claims that it’s far *more* effective to convince your *interlocutor* to wear one. Also I’ve since had to switch to cloth masks for work, rationing my few remaining surgical masks for the fortnightly Errand Days where I’m probably coming into contact with more people.)

The last three or so fortnights I’ve finally started seeing other grocery shoppers with masks. Uptake is somewhat higher there, probably because even non-assholes need groceries, but I’d guess it’s only maybe 30%.

—

Maybe New York has had the seriousness of this beaten into them more by having so many cases? I was gonna say “official stats are that about one out of every thousand people in my regional municipality† has had COVID-19 (though tests are rationed enough that who knows what the real stats are)”, but apparently even with our growth being more linear than exponential it’s up to 1/550 now. Although it’s majority nursing-home residents and staff, so I suppose if you don’t have contact with nursing homes you should re-weight your probabilities accordingly. (OTOH, how *much* of it being majority nursing-home people is that nursing-home people are high priority in the test triaging?)

—

†Like a county, but with more of the government operating at county-level rather than town-level.

Tags:

#I’ve been thinking about this so much that it’s hard to keep track of #which of these things I’ve said publicly and which I’ve said privately and which I haven’t said at all #I hope I’ve included the correct amount of context‚ let me know if I haven’t #replies #rustingbridges #our home and cherished land #home of the brave #politics cw #illness tw #covid19 #in which Brin has a job #discourse cw? #rants

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

argumate:

While mask wearing has become far more common, it is far from universally accepted. Instead, whether to wear a mask or not has become a new front in America’s bitterly partisan culture wars.

In broad terms, wearing a mask has become associated with the progressive side of politics. Not wearing one has become a symbol of conservative defiance.

Americans are compelled to do this for every possible thing huh

 

eightyonekilograms:

It used to be that paragraphs like the above would make me wish for a deadly plague to kill everyone, but now we know that even a deadly plague is not enough. There is no escape from this hell.

I don’t know, from where I’m standing these days (at a Canadian customer-facing “““essential””” job where maybe 10% of customers are masked), [convincing 50% of the population to wear masks in exchange for giving up on the other 50%] vs [what we have now] seems like a genuinely difficult choice.

(especially if you can convince a half that’s disproportionately young and therefore disproportionately likely to be asymptomatic carriers…)

Though I find it a bit confusing that the people known for actually giving a shit about purity and contamination are the people *against* masks. I mean, I suppose there’s a distrust-of-hostile-authorities thing at play here, but that seriously outweighs the filth?

Tags:

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pengychan:

rumbutt:

screenageralex:

Being 18-25 is like playing a video game where you’ve skipped the tutorial and you’re just sort of running about with no idea how anything works

Being 25-30 is like later on in the game when you’ve figured out how things work, but have made poor leveling decisions along the way and are now horribly underpowered for what you’re supposed to be doing.

Being 30-35 is coming to the conclusion that if wildly swinging a sword at random while screaming has gotten you this far, may as well keep at it. 

Tags:

#I’m 26 and #yeah pretty much #sometimes I wonder if sending a message back to 18-year-old me telling her to major in accounting would actually result in a better timeline #or if I needed to take the long road to that realisation #maybe I should just tell 18-year-old me to take up MMO merchanting as a hobby and trust her to come to the appropriate conclusions herself #still‚ though‚ maybe there are universes out there where I figured it out sooner and took fewer fallthrough courses #I can see her now‚ sitting at the dining room table with a work-issued laptop‚ remotely updating their databases #until it’s safe to return to her cubicle #meanwhile here I am preparing to go out there #and serve rotting food to those few assholes who insist on getting takeout in the middle of a plague #spraying everything down with sanitiser after each one #(except sometimes they show up one after another and there isn’t time) #go home and spend 40 minutes carefully decontaminating #wipe down the laundry basket with store-brand Lysol after I put my uniform in the wash #every time I hug my mom I wonder if by doing so I am sealing her fate #(she insists that I not lock myself in my bedroom until and unless I start showing symptoms) #tag rambles #in which Brin has a job #covid19 #illness tw #death tw? #adventures in University Land

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judiciousimprecation:

Saw a lady on the bus wearing one of those fancy one-way valved n95 masks, and I tried to figure out why I felt so much irritation with this random stranger.

Obviously the majority of this was just that I was envious she either got ahold of masks before they went out of stock everywhere, or paid a ridiculous price for them, but also I realized, those valved n95 masks are like the exact opposite of regular surgical masks, courtesy-wise.

The surgical masks mostly just block the wearers sneezes and coughs and reduce the amount of infection they might spread, while not doing much to prevent inhaling germs. They are a device which protects bystanders much more than the wearer.

The n95 masks meanwhile, theoretically block all germs from getting into the wearer (modulo proper use), but the one-way valve means unfiltered breath from the wearer makes it back into the atmosphere, thereby blocking way less of the germs they might be exhaling. Thus the valved n95 masks do absolutely fuck-all for bystanders. Fuck you, I got mine

 

etiragram:

Your attitude surprises me. This person is not doing something wrong. Consider the universe where they covered exactly the same route, but without the mask. In that universe, they risked everyone else they came into contact with as much as they did in this one, but also incurred additional risk themself. And in this world, if the mask made a difference, they have reduced the probability of hurting other people by becoming an extra node in the transmitting network.

Feeling irritation with this person for protecting themself without addition protection to others is in some ways akin to feeling irritation for wearing a seat belt. And there’s an aspect to it that’s pretty similar to “How dare this person do the same thing many other people do, but incur fewer costs for it”.

In my opinion, the only thing they could be said to have done wrong is in buying up a scarce resource that some people say medical professionals need far more, but only if they believed they were making more people worse off somewhere and still chose to buy it.

 

judiciousimprecation:

Te be clear, I fully acknowledge that my attitude toward this person was irrational, and I think part of the reason the experience stuck with me was because I was confused about why I was feeling that way. I tried to touch on that in the second paragraph but I definitely could have been more clear that I don’t really endorse it.

I think, having grown up in a country where wearing masks is not a normal thing to do even when (avoiding being) sick, seeing someone wearing a surgical mask tickles the (entirely unendorsed!) “this person is wrong for doing a weird thing, shun them” and normally I compensate for that by reminding myself “no, it’s cool, they’re probably doing it as a courtesy to others, cut them some slack”. Without that loophole it’s much harder to shut that part of my brain up.

I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?), and I’d be incredibly curious to see what a statistical toy model looks like where half the population gets ingress-only masks or egress-only masks, but in retrospect I definitely leaned too hard on the “people wearing valved respirators are jerks who care about no one but themselves” angle

Back before COVID-19, I bought a valved mask in significant part because I figured signalling “this mask is for my protection, not yours” would make me look like *less* of a jerk.

(‘I’m not going out in public while sick, I promise! I’m just highly sensitive to pollen! I’m not dangerous, please don’t be scared!’)

Turns out the valve was a weak point and the mask failed almost immediately. Mom wants to try tinkering with it and seeing if she can repair it, but I’m probably back to surgical masks for the foreseeable future. I was already worried that I was going to scare people who saw me take off a surgical mask on my way into the restaurant and then go and serve them food, and that’s probably even *more* of a concern in the midst of a plague.

—

>>I still think there’s something interesting to the “keep everyone else from getting sick” vs “keep only myself from getting sick” dichotomy (oh no, is this prisoner’s dilemma?)<<

The impression I got reading your OP is that the reason it was bothering you is that it *wasn’t* prisoner’s dilemma, that she *could* have protected herself *and* others (with a non-valved N95) but instead chose to protect only herself, sacrificing others’ *safety* for her *comfort* (slightly less restricted breathing, less foggy glasses if applicable).

(this is speaking about the hypothetical world where your intuition was justified; in the endorsed world she may very well have had access to valved N95s but not non-valved)

Tags:

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maryellencarter:

So here’s a thing. I went to Lush a while back to check out their bath bombs etc, having acquired a bathtub for the first time in over a year. (Verdict: most smells are indiscernible to me, bath bombs take more patience than I have, bubble bath bars make the bathwater feel weirdly gritty or maybe I’m just using too big a chunk of one, but I am intrigued by the glitter body bar they had and may eventually go back to buy one.)

The thing is, every time I see people talking about Lush, it’s “yeah the products are great but ONOES THE STAFF they descend upon you like locusts!” and I’m like… yes? I walked in and the sales gentleman was very cheerful and answered all my questions, of which I had a fuckton, and demonstrated bath bombs and bubble bath bars for me and explained the bath oil melts, and then let me sniff everything at my own pace and did not upsell me. And to me the *best* part was that I did not have to go to an effort to get his attention and make shy little gestures trying to catch his eye and indicate that I wished to be helped, I walked in and he was right there being like “Have you been here before? Do you know what you’re looking for? Here are bath bombs!” and I was like “I heard your glitter is not microplastics” and he was like “Let me explain SYNTHETIC MICA GLITTER to you”, which admittedly is the way to my heart because geochemistry! But like… I liked it. I did not find it overwhelming or Oh The Horror. He got me a hand towel so I wasn’t mixing glitters everywhere, and then let me go methodically down the row of shelves sniffing everything while he restocked the other side of the store. It was neat.

So like. Is this just an introvert/extrovert thing? Is it simply that the introvert wishes to achieve bath bombs with no human interaction whatsoever, and a “how may I help / I’m just here for this specific thing / ok cool let me know if you need help” is too Much? Or do they force conversation if you haven’t already spent fifteen minutes being fascinated by product demonstrations?

>>And to me the *best* part was that I did not have to go to an effort to get his attention and make shy little gestures trying to catch his eye and indicate that I wished to be helped<<

That doesn’t tend to be my experience.

Now that I’ve worked in fast food, I am…maybe not more *reluctant*, I still do it roughly the same amount, but I feel guilty when I enter a store without a clear intention to buy something. Because I know, now, how fucking *awkward* it is from the staff perspective to have a potential customer you aren’t actively helping (waiting in line *mostly* doesn’t count). You can’t just go about your business cleaning and restocking and so on: you have to orient yourself around them, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice if/when they end up wanting your help.

(Plus you can’t *just* hover around them, because that is Pressuring and also Wasting Company Time. You have to find things to do that allow you to be productive while *also* keeping an eye out for any sign of their wanting help, and that allow you to drop everything and immediately help them if/when that happens.)

I wish that our culture’s stock of standardised customer/staff interaction phrases had one for “I waive my right to prompt, responsive service: please go about your business as if I were not here. I understand that I will need to actively seek out your help if I find I want it, and that you might not be available right away.”. I’ve been trying out telling the staff of stores I wander into that I am “just looking around”, and I think this is at least *somewhat* effective, but I’m not sure it’s strong enough.

(maybe I’ll add a “don’t mind me”, that might help)

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transsexualite:

Is it just me or does 90% of gendering occur at restaurants and fast food places

 

transsexualite:

petition to force restaurants to replace “sir/maam” with “mortal”

 

transsexualite:

okay but like fucjing imagine rolling up to the drive thru and a brooding cashier says “your total is $11.60, mortal”

 

shacklesburst:

who’s spreading rumors i’m mortal?!

 

dagny-hashtaggart:

In which the big golden M stands for both “memento” and “mori”

 

serinemolecule:

Come to Asia! It’s really only Indo-European languages that have gendered honorifics. In Japan, service workers always use “Honored Guest”.

If you watch anime, notice how words like “senpai” and “-san” aren’t gendered at all.

Linguistic gender was invented in Proto-Indo-European as a neat party trick to make it clearer which pronoun referred to what. And then most languages in the world came to be descended from it. But the languages that aren’t don’t make random words gendered.

My native dialect of English technically *has* sir/ma’am but doesn’t use them much†, and it weirds me out when my co-workers call customers “sir” and “ma’am”. I just don’t call customers anything: there’s really no need to add *any* word to the end of, to use OP’s example, “your total is $11.60”.

(Boss, Meta-Boss, and Boss^3 have all witnessed me talking to customers a fair bit, and none of them have ever complained about this. Boss^3 specifically complimented my customer interaction!)

—

†I’m not sure I can articulate or whether I even consciously understand what the exceptions are, but I think it’s something about the power differential needing to be *vast*. People who are only a level or two above you in the social hierarchy don’t get honorifics; those are for, like, CEOs and political leaders. (or maybe it’s about them needing to be very highly ranked in absolute terms: I poked my intuition with some more hypotheticals and it seems to feel less weird to call a barely-above-you man “sir” if you yourself are already pretty high up)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #death mention #gender #in which Brin has a job

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quoms:

American currency pet peeves power ranking

3. The fact that pennies still, somehow, exist in 2019

2b. Nickels are easily mistaken for quarters, a result of American currency designers’ longstanding embrace of the idea that money looking different is somehow a deficiency

2a. All bills same size and color (cf. 2b)

1. A dime is incredibly small in comparison to a penny (in fact it is nearly the smallest coin I have ever handled, second only to a Georgian 1 tetri coin worth 0.36¢) yet worth ten times as much! Who the fuck allowed this! On what Earth!!!

 

ponteh2dhh1ksdiwesph2tres:

bad post, no mention of dollar bills

 

rustingbridges:

I’m actually going to disagree with on almost all of these points

  1. small coins are, actually, good, because they minimize the burden of carrying around all these random chunks of metal. this is the actual reason nickels are bad.

2a. color okay, but bills being different sizes is just displeasing. I get that blind people like to know how much money they have but they just fit together so nicely!

2b. this has never happened to me

  1. just because I’m able to tolerate the government putting xenoestrogens in my water supply doesn’t mean I’m gonna let them start rounding up prices to the nearest nickel. it’s bad enough that none of the “99¢” pizza shops give you a penny. $3.99 for a gyro my ass, it’s $4. anyway I’m not gonna tolerate a world where we have 96¢ pizza places. just no

 

brin-bellway:

Who said anything about rounding *up* to the next nickel? I was just talking last week [link] about exploiting round-to-the-*closest*-nickel laws to get 52c items for 50c.

(Our bills are all the same size, but different colours and marked with Braille-like dots.)

 

rustingbridges:

Exactly: the rounding will introduce an element I have to care about and track, or else be exploited for a percentage or two by people who care more or have enough volume for the marginal cents to matter.

I am not in favor of increasing transaction costs.

(see also this other branch)

True, although there are very few cases in which someone worried about every last percent would be paying cash at all [link]. Even most employee-discounted fast food costs enough to be cheaper with a credit card: only the *very* cheapest items are worth even *considering* paying cash for.

(Maybe somewhat more cases in a place like NYC, with more street vendors? Vendors are *starting* to take credit cards now that there are card readers that use smartphones as their infrastructure connection [link], but there are still many who haven’t done that yet. And come to think of it there’s those Chinese restaurants that give you a 10% discount for paying cash, but that would be big enough to wash out other considerations and make it worthwhile to pay cash *regardless* of whether it’s rounded in your favour or not.)

Payment optimisation is a fun game, but I get not wanting to penalise people who hate playing it: the rest of us can always get it out of our system by becoming player merchants in MMOs and stuff like that.

—

From a seller’s point of view, it’s tricky to ensure that round-to-the-closest-nickel comes out in your favour, although that might be from being a franchise (prices set by people many levels above the actual store owners). As of yesterday evening, we’d *lost* 15 cents that day on cash rounding two of which went to me. That’s an unusually large number: on most evenings that I see the figure it’s a couple of cents in one direction or the other.

Tags:

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gasmaskaesthetic:

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.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

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 ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

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.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.)

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.)

 

cromulentenough:

The solution to employers making it difficult to get pay statements is not…keep on using physical cheques in the year of our lord 2019.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

You tagged it #wtf America but I think @brin-bellway is canadian

 

cromulentenough:

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.)

 

cromulentenough:

Ah ok, ‘occasionally receive cheques but never write them’ is closer to my experience too, although I don’t know anyone who gets paid for their job by cheque.

I also got a cheque for a scholarship type thing so it is still around very occasionally here.

(see also this other branch)

Tags:

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gasmaskaesthetic:

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.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

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 ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

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.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.)

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.)

 

cromulentenough:

The solution to employers making it difficult to get pay statements is not…keep on using physical cheques in the year of our lord 2019.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

You tagged it #wtf America but I think @brin-bellway is canadian

 

cromulentenough:

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

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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gasmaskaesthetic:

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.

 

shieldfoss:

America really is a whole other country

 

argumate:

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 ]

 

shieldfoss:

“Oh you guys have to press a button?”

 

shacklesburst:

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.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

This post wasn’t about payroll but yes

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.)

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

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

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