Today is a lame day for a Wednesday and not a lot is going on

at the moment. Anne's out of here for her 3pm start. It's my usual line up for me.

But I have a work related issue that needs to be addressed on the job. Most businesses pay out vacation pay. Since the place I work at pays weekly hence my vacation pay is paid out on a weekly basis. Right now it's at 6% of my weekly gross pay. I think it caps out at 8%. However, I have my vacation pay accrued every week. That means my company holds it back for me, like a bank account upon my request. It's a release form I have to fill out. I can take out as many "draws" as I want. Usually I do this twice a year, at the end of June and just around Christmas time. Last Christmas when I tried to take out my vacation pay I got a memo from head office saying there was an "overpayment" and so no vacation pay will be released. This kind of took me for a spin. Huh? I never saw any increase in my rate of pay since last June till December. Last time I took a draw was last June. I figured well, ok. Give them the benefit of the doubt. Then a few months back I heard that this happened to other people in the office as well. Some of them were saying I should do something about this. I thought, well lets see if they do this again and site an "overpayment" when I take out my vacation pay in June.

The thing is, there's no explanation as to where the overpayment came out from. Then my wife looked at my pay stub last week and discovered my vacation pay is not showing up on my pay cheque. it should show as a running balance. Uh-oh. I've been so worried about my job lately I was to timid to rock the boat and say something. Now that everything is more or less ok, I need to find out what's going on with this.

The first thing I'm going to do is contact Rob this afternoon if he hasn't left the office when I get there and say that my vacation pay is not showing up on my pay cheque. Could he ask HO what's going on? If a memo comes back saying again about an overpayment without an explanation, then I'm going to ask for a history of my "overpayment." Could they email Rob. If they don't do anything for say the rest of this month then I'll ask one more time with a push: Something like "Or James will bring this up with Alberta Employment Standards if this isn't resolved." AES is the labor board. Their lawyer's will most likely open proceedings to do an internal audit of my company and that could be a big headache they don't need. I need to be careful here as I'm in unfamiliar waters. What I think? HO is confusing my bonus money as an overpayment. last week for instance I was expecting $35 in bonus money. This is for things like CC sales etc. Imagine my surprise when I got $5. That kind of told me that it's HO fouling things up again. I asked Super to make sure that $30 gets on this cheque and he placed it on the attendance sheet. It sounds like they're trying to get rif of me. Force me to quit.

Tonight, is the Old Timer hockey game. or OTH as we call it. Odd how my wife got a couple of vouchers from her place of work. I know business trades ad space in the hockey programs and my wife's place of employment might be one of the partner companies.

Speaking of companies and such AIG as everyone knows is in the news again. Politicians are passing blame and pointing fingers. Basically they're showboating more then anything. Right now the banks need trust. If there's no trust, credit can't circulate. Trust is a two way street folks, it works both ways.

I'm still reading "The third Lynx." I'm really enjoying this book. I like books that are in first person. There are so few first person books these days.

Last night on Coast they had Gregg Braden on again. He's got a whack of YouTube videos on spiritualist like topics. He's a great speaker and a favorite on Coast.

Also, it seems that Robert J Sawyer is coming to Edmonton on one of his book tours promoting Wake. Most likely this will be at Audrey's again. The date will be Thursday April 23rd. I don't have a copy of Wake yet but he'll have a lot of them in hard copy on his table. I'm not a 100% sure he'll be at Audrey's but he was last time to promote Rollback a few years ago. I'll email him when I come home tonight and I'll have an answer most likely tomorrow.

We're still getting some cold weather around here. Too cold for Spring, which begins on Friday. But we're going to see a lot less of the -15C's and crap like that out here. By the end of march early April the snow should all be but gone.

Anyway gang, that's all for now

e. Jim