Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Honesty May Be The Best Policy, BUT...


When you work for several employers, as I do, and all of your paychecks come in the form of direct deposits, it's always a bit of a guessing game as to when you'll get paid, and what the exact amount of payment will be. So every week or so, I find myself going online to look at my checking account and match up the deposits to my calendar and make sure I've been paid properly.

Yesterday, I went online and saw something impressive... a deposit of nearly three thousand dollars! The thing is - I haven't done anywhere NEAR three thousand dollars worth of work for any single employer in recent times. I checked and double-checked my calendar, and then started doing some detective work, and figured out which employer has the overly generous payroll department.

I found my pay stub for this client in the company's online portal, and soon discovered the company's error. While we had agreed on a DAILY rate, the company's timesheet still required me to post the number of hours I had worked. What happened was that the company ended up paying me my daily rate PER HOUR!

So now, I'm left with this very impressive pile of extra cash in my checking account. Do I tell the company, or do I jet off to Vegas? Lest you think of me as some dishonest cad, I will let you know that I immediately emailed the employer, and even sent them a screen cap of my online paystub to explain the error of their ways. I know from having run a departmental budget for many years that as soon as the news manager noticed a sizable spending anomaly in his budget, it would take about 5 minutes to figure out what happened. I have not heard back from them yet, but I'm sure somehow that the little "gift" will soon be gone as quickly as it arrived...

But in the back of my mind, there's a little fantasy playing out that they will be so embarrassed by their shocking oversight that they will tell me to just keep the cash.

I can dream, can't I?

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