My PC crashed a very final, fatal crash about six weeks ago. While I was able to salvage some of the more important things from it (pictures, a few documents), the machine itself was useless. My sister, who is in IT, was able to rebuild a machine for me from spare parts that works fine except that it cannot access our wireless internet. Without wireless internet, I cannot get the driver to get the PC to talk to my printer.
Fortunately, I had just purchased an Acer notebook less than a month before. The Acer has become my mainstay in net connectivity. I was lucky in that I was able to get Windows XP (I really didnât want anything to do with Vista). I was unlucky in that I am now stuck with Word 2007 and Excel 2007. I cannot find ANYTHING anymore. It took me nearly five minutes just to figure out how to save document. Why in the world did they think it was an improvement to put spell-check, font changes and indents all on different tabs? And how in the world was anybody supposed to know that the decorative little Microbrain decal in the upper right corner actually hid the âsaveâ options? I wonât even get into how theyâve completely mucked up Outlook by embedding the email options into Word now.
And where the hell did they hide âSelect Allâ?
I was finally forced to call my former place of employment yesterday. One of the terms of my severance was that Iâd be paid out all my PTO (paid time off) that Iâd earned. Since I was sitting on about 74 hours worth of PTO, that was a fairly significant amount of money. The letter Iâd received from them indicated that the PTO was to be paid in my final paycheck, but I didnât know if that meant in my final earned paycheck or my final severance paycheck. The itemization on my paystub was confusing â it looked as though the PTO had been paid out, but there was no cash associated with the line item entry. Iâd let it go a couple of weeks, hoping it would resolve itself and I wouldnât actually have to call, but luck was not with me. HRâs initial reaction was that it had been paid out weeks ago, but Mr. Benefits cut himself off in midsentence when he saw that my 74 hours had zero dollars associated with it. I have been assured that this will come through on my next severance pay.
I must resist the temptation to see next weekâs pay as some sort of windfall. Because most of the deductions are not being taken out of my severance (I no longer pay into the 401(k), for short or long term disability, that sort of thing), the weekly severance checks have actually been larger than my usual paychecks. Add nearly two more weeks of pay on top, and at least Iâll have a nice buffer to lean back on for a few weeks. I just need to resist feeling wealthy and making unnecessary purchases.