You Dirty Rotten Bastards!

So I edited my last post on February 25th to mention another useless (but completely AWESOME!) toy I bought.  Unlike the other items I bought this one was predicated on me getting a big surprise influx of cash.

To recap that situation really quick, part of working at this particular correctional facility is the 'retention bonus'.  I get $5000 every year just for working there.  I didn't know about this bonus when I was trying to get the job but I was incredibly happy reading about it in the Union contract.

I should add... reading a labor contract negotiated between the State and the UAW is NOT as clear as anybody would like it.  The part of the contract that spelled out the retention bonus also covered the possible use of a recruitment bonus... so the language was QUITE unclear.  A whole lot of 'If this particular nitpicky criteria is met in this time frame at this particular location while a cat crosses the road in this other area THEN this thing will happen'.  So even when I got the job, even when my supervisor told me that yes in fact there was a retention bonus, even when my co-workers said that I would qualify as I had two years as a state employee and worked there.... even THEN I held my breath.  I figured once the state actually gave me the check (well... deposited it into my account.  I mean who actually picks up a paycheck now-a-days!?), I would believe it.  If they didn't pay me the bonus... well that's the breaks and I would most certainly qualify for it next year.


Well... early last week one of my colleagues asked me if I had got it.  I was confused as to how I'd know that as we don't get paid (deposited into my account) until Thursday.  I then realized that they post our 'pay stub' earlier in the week.  So I logged in and... BOOM!!!! My net pay was HUGE!  Naturally on Thursday I checked my balance and I had in fact been given the retention bonus!

Now I'm not good at holding on to money.  I tend to let it slip through my fingers rather quickly.  That's kind of the point of me buying useless overpriced toys.  I have cash, I have a slight want for some techy thingy, I buy said techy thingy.  So I didn't want $3000 just sitting in my account with no where to go.  This was 'surprise' money as far as I was concerned and NOT spending it on useless overpriced toys would be the best way to spend it.  As my car loan has no interest and as I had already paid off my credit card, I decided to just toss all of that sweet sweet bonus money onto my Student Loans.  An extra $3000 is almost five full payments on it's own.  Plus paying on the principal there might save me a few extra hundred in saved interest over the next seven years (Yeah... I still have seven years to pay off my damned student loans!).

But when I gave it a bit of thought, I decided to buy at least one toy.  Something that even my slippery handed money losing self wouldn't buy if I didn't have such a large amount of 'free' money.

Enter the Acer XR341CK.   At over $900 for a monitor this is one damned expensive  purchase and I most certainly wouldn't buy it without an extra three grand just laying around.  But I DID have that so I ordered it Thursday. With Amazon Prime that included free two day shipping which they said would be delivered on Monday.  I was fine with a Monday delivery as I worked over the weekend and wouldn't  have a lot of time to play with it until then.

God Bless Fed-Ex.  They take two day shipping seriously.  It was delivered Saturday morning and after getting home from work to see this massive box in my living room it was set up Saturday evening.

OH MY GOD!

It's Glorious!

First, lemme tell you about it's size.  In the position I have it on my desk (the base is at the very end of my desk, so I can't push it further away) and the position I sit in it takes up almost all of my side to side vision.  If I want to see the start menu I can do it without turning my head, but it is distinctly in my peripheral vision.  The same applies to t he time and the clock.  If I want to actually functionally see them, I have to turn my head.

Here's a  screen shot of my current setup:

Yes, you are seeing that correctly as I didn't shrink the image down (hold that thought... Blogger shrunk down the image automatically.  Trust me though... it's BIG!).  My desktop resolution is now 3440 x 1440.  I can have my browser open to it's normal width, iTunes off to one side and Photoshop open on the other.

I left my speakers where they were on either side of my other monitor... and they are now both behind this beast.

Beyond the size, this is one damned clear monitor.  I never thought of my old monitor as bad.  I mean it was showing off at 1920 x 1200.  That's more than HD quality and still higher than many (if not most) monitors sold today.  It was a 24" 16:10 (so not quite as wide as 16:9) monitor.  When I bought it back in 2007 I believe it went for about $400.  A quick calculation shows that it had about 90 pixels per inch for pixel density.  This new monitor has about 109 pixels per inch.   So we're not exactly talking about a night and day difference.

But to my eyes this is the deepest darkest night compared to the highest brightest day!  Everything seems so fucking SHARP!  I know... a 27" 4K monitor would be even sharper with it's 160 pixels per inch... but still.  I mean... WOW!

I had read that being an IPS screen, the color accuracy would be better.  That it would improve the viewing angles.   These have both turned out to be true.  For the viewing angles... on my old monitor I could see color shifts by simply sitting up straight or slouching down.  I now remember how frustrating that was when working in Photoshop.  It took a good long time for me to get the monitor set up so that it was even with my normal eye position and then learn to only judge fine colors when it was right in front of my eyes.

This monitor?  I can't spot a difference in any of the colors from top to bottom, from left to right with any movement I can do in my seat.  Seriously.  Working in Photoshop on this beast will be more like a CRT screen than an LCD screen!

For color accuracy it's the same issue.  I can see finer details and differences in colors.  There is a website that I've gone to for years and years and I never noticed that the colored box around the stories was a very pale yellow.  It just blended into the white background of the page.  I knew there WAS a box as it was just slightly darker than the white... but if I slouched and looked up at my screen it looked just a tad blue.  If I stretched my neck and looked at the bottom it looked gray.  Now?  It's a nice pale yellow no matter where I look at it from.  I even took a screenshot and pulled it into Photoshop to see what it registered at!  It's YELLOW!

I've only been sitting in front of the new monitor for a grand total of  hours now between last night and now, but it's impressed me every minute and I am completely in love.  Which is why I won't be returning it.  Instead I'll call up Amazon and see if they can 'return' it on my debit card and place it instead on my credit card.  Why would I transfer the funds that way?  Oh... I guess you forgot the image at the top of this thread.

The fucking state is taking the God damned bonus BACK!

Friday morning as I was getting ready for work I got a voicemail.  While walking out to my car I read it and it was from one of the Human Resource administrators.  She said she was sorry to be calling but that she needed to let me know that I was given the $5,000 retention bonus in error and that they have to figure out how they're going to... need to take it back.  She goes on to mention that the contract from 2008 says "You have to be employed at the facility for at least 2080 hours on the last day of the first full pay period in February".   She then reminded me that I needed to call her immediately and blah blah blah.

I immediately turned around and quickly logged into my computer.  I was thankfully able to stop the extra $2,000 payment on my student loans.  Unfortunately at that point Fed Ex had already picked the monitor up from Amazon and it was on it's way to me.  They money had already been taken out of my account and I couldn't just simply stop the transaction.  Sure... I probably could have called Amazon and canceled the order... I probably would have had to pay for shipping back to them but at this point I didn't even know what the hell was going on.

When I got into work the officer at the information desk called me over and said I was to call the HR Administration.  I told her that I had already received the message but I was running late and needed to get into my shift.  I would call her back later.

When I walked into the health center the health secretary peeked out of her office and rushed over to me telling me that the HR Admin was trying to get a hold of me and that I needed to call her back.  I thanked her for the message and told her I would call HR back once I had a free minute in my shift.

When I got to the nurses station my supervisor was there and told me that the HR administrator had called her and that I needed to call her back immediately.  I smiled (now really frustrated and pissed off) and told my supervisor that I would call HR once I got to a free moment in my shift.  My supervisor is great, so when she told me that I could go ahead and call her now if I wanted I felt fine saying "Oh I want to get my job done.  I wouldn't want the State to pay me money only to take it back a day later because I wasn't working and that according to the contract I have to be working in order to get paid!"

My supervisor at that point had a very good idea what the conversation with HR was going to be about so she let me do my thing.

Once I reached a spare moment (it only took about 15 minutes... there isn't a lot to do in this job), I got online and looked up the contract.  Yes... if you read it through and follow all the bad grammar, it does say that you have to work in the facility for that time frame and not just as a State Employee and be currently working in that facility at the time of the bonus.

I have to share this as I held my tongue on these little bitter points.  None of them changed the fact that the State didn't have to pay me that money and that I would eventually be paying it back.  But the contract that she quoted from 2008?  It expired in 2010.  Our current contract was written in 2014.  Yes, that paragraph didn't change but how would she know if she was reading only the old version?  Second bitter point.... we were paid the bonus in our check for the first two weeks of February.  But look at a calendar?  See January 31st?  Yup, our first FULL pay period in February wouldn't end until 2/28/2016.  And trust me, I'm not the one nitpicking that... that's the way the contract is written.  In fact it says the bonus would be paid out in MARCH!

But again... I held my tongue on these points as they didn't change the relevant point.  I did not earn that bonus as the contract is written.

I took a full three minutes of deep breathing to calm myself enough to call the HR Admin.  I told myself that I would be calm, tell her that I would need a few days to figure out how I could get that money together as I had already spent it.  When I got her on the phone that plan went out the window.  She was happy and cheerful even when talking about the mistake that they made.  Come on.  You're talking about a really big huge slap-in-the-face bait and switch here... at least sound like you are understanding how I could be upset at this.  Not only was she happy... she let it slip that it was directly HER that fucked this up.  She was the one that set up which nurses get the bonus and which ones don't get it.  I had heard stories about how they screwed with the nurses and denied them this particular bonus in the past.  For example when she hired a co-worker she called and told her in late January that she was hired... and would be starting in March.  Why wait a month?  Because she wouldn't have the 2080 hours in for the next bonus.

Bitch.

The last straw was when she said I could stop by that day and pay it back.  If I didn't have the cash I could bring a check.

I'm not making up that.  In fact I'm making it sound nicer as she actually laughed in there.  Here's how I remember it:

"Oh you can just stop by anytime today and pay us back.  If you don't have the cash on you, HAHA, you can just make a check out.  It won't be to me, but to the State."

Bitch.

I waited for a beat or two just to make sure I wouldn't rage shout into the phone.  When I had my calm I told her in a dead voice that there was a problem.  I had already spent the money and couldn't get it back.   That she was going to have to get me some kind of payment plan for the fuck up the state... I mean you... just did.  I think I can afford about $50 a check.

Sweet sweet silence was her return to that.  She eventually fumbled a few words and then said she'd have to talk to her supervisor and get back to me.  I told her that was fine, that she could call me on my cell phone, at the information desk, at the health secretary's office, on my supervisors phone, and that if she couldn't reach me about this personal matter between me and the HR department she could just have me paged over the facility's loud speaker system.

I hung up before I could get her answer.

My supervisor was right behind me and said in a private voice "Don't ever get angry at me!"

You know what... mistakes happen.  It sucks but no one is perfect and no man made system is ever going to be perfect.  Yes, this particular error stings... but shit happens right?  It's not like I DON'T have the money.  It's there, in my account ready to be paid back even without switching the monitor to my credit card.  That would put me at almost NO money in my account and I don't find that acceptable so I WILL transfer the monitor to my credit card, but the point is I could have stopped by the HR office on my break and settled this matter.

But no.  She had to be rude.  She had to make a joke out of HER mistakenly paying me $5,000 and my making a check out to HER.  Fuck her.  This way she has to call up her supervisor and explain how SHE fucked up and mistakenly paid me a bonus which I didn't earn.

If she doesn't call me back on Monday, I'll call her back and get this settled.  And there is no freaking way I'm giving up this monitor!  You want to know how I feel about this glorious, ultra wide-screen monitor?

It's now my Precious!