Extremely Lame

I work in the public sector in North Texas. I’ve recently been awarded a $4.00 per hour raise. So, why am I upset about that? That’s a long story. Please, have a seat.

I took my test to get licensed back in January.  It’s now the middle of April and I won’t see the fruits of that test until the end of this month. That’s three months, which is entirely too long. And it’s all because of dueling bureaucracies that pretend like the other one doesn’t exist, so everything has to be relayed between the two of them by me.

The first hurdle came from the state governmental agency.  Once I took the exam, they had to grade it. It took them three weeks. Three weeks to grade a Scantron test. I took tests like those back in high school like fifteen years ago, so it’s not exactly new technology. Even the dimmest of teachers could get the results to us the next day, so I can’t imagine why it’d take more than a week to grade the couple hundred they get from across the state every third Thursday. Run them through, BOOM they’re graded. There’s entirely no reason it should take three weeks.

After that, it took them two more weeks to get the certificates printed and mailed. That’s not so bad. Unfortunately, the state agency didn’t think I had sufficient experience to take the test. The rules require two years of experience unless you have at least thirty-six college credit hours upon which the requirement drops to one year. Unfortunately, they couldn’t grasp that having a four year degree required more than thirty-six credit hours.

So, in order to prove that my four year degree from a real brick and mortar university required more than thirty-six credits, I had to go to the university website and get a copy of my transcripts. Thank the gods I didn’t have to get official transcripts or that would have taken another month. Instead, I just had to navigate my way through a system that wasn’t in place when I went to school there, so there was all the hullabaloo over proving I was me to get an account so I could access it. At least I didn’t have to deal with the registrar’s office.

So, after getting proof that a four year degree did indeed require more than thirty-six hours of coursework, everything got processed and mailed to me in a week. Too bad the city bureaucracy needed that piece of paper as proof that I indeed had my license, despite the fact that all the pertinent information that they needed from it got put up on the state agency’s official website as soon as it was processed. I even tried to provide the city’s bureaucracy a physical hard copy of the pertinent info as well as a link to the state agency’s website so they could look it up themselves. Oh no, they needed a copy of my certificate (not even the original) to prove it. That’s shadier proof than the damn state website. People have their licenses up in our control room. I could take one of those out of the frame, photocopy it, put it back, scan the copy at home and photoshop my name and license number onto it and print it. Hell, I did do that in something like an hour, but I had a crisis of conscience and didn’t turn it in.

So, after all this nonsense, it takes the city three weeks to get everything in order and they have the gall to tell me that they aren’t going to backdate my pay rate at all, so I went three additional months of sub-par pay when I had earned my decent wage.

Let’s do some math, shall we? Just to see how much these two bureaucracies cost me. One two week paycheck with no additional overtime is approximately a $300 boost. Each twelve hour shift is something like an extra $90. Those three weeks the city was dragging their feet covered two paychecks and four days of overtime, so that’s $960. Giving the state until February to get tests graded and certificates mailed (I took the test on the 17th of January), there are three paychecks that came and went before the state got everything in order. During that time, I had three additional days of overtime. That’s $1170 that was lost to me by the state. So, between these collective heads of knuckle, they cost me $2130. That’s net pay, not gross pay. I could have done a hell of a lot with $2130.