ranting and raving

It’s been a very emotional day. Trying to make this long story short is going to be a challenge but basically, I discovered last Friday that the city has been overpaying since I started my position at Reference at the end of July. I was naive enough to believe that since it was their mistake that they would be willing to work with me and come up with a solution that would be convenient for me. But, alas, the head of the human resource department doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of the word “cooperation”, and turned down every proposal that we suggested. My bosses at work have been extremely helpful in trying to get things sorted out for me. All I wanted to do was pay the lump some that I owed them which, by the way, was over $800, rather than have them deduct it from my future paychecks for the next three months. My father was going to loan me the money to do this. That way the problem would be solved faster and I could pay my father back at a pace that was convenient to me. Apparently this was not a possible solution. I was also requesting an official apology from the human resource department since this was a ghastly error on their part. Turns out they are incapable of doing this as well. So I visited with the city manager today and under the suggestion of my co-workers, I brought my father along with me since he was going to be the one to write the check and also for support. I was very apprehensive about inviting him and worried about how it would look, which it turns out I was right to feel this way because the first thing the city manager did when we walked in was voice his discomfort with having my father there and proceeded to scold me for inviting him without informing him of it first. I am quite curious as to why I should have informed him when the director of our library had already informed him by email the day before. If he was going to find my fathers presence so threatening he should have told me so in one of the two phone conversations we had earlier that day. I asked my father to wait outside. At this point I was ready to throw away any intention of proceeding with a diplomatic discussion. I hate how these tense moments have a way of creating a mental block in your brain that inables you to say the right thing at the right moment. You can always come up with something good an hour or so later after you’ve analyzed the conversation but by then it’s too late and any such statement will just lack impact. So, I never really got to tell my side of the story because the city manager seemed much to interested in hearing his own voice. He had obviously made up his mind about my situation long before I had walked into his office. It became clear that any attempt I was to make was useless because he didn’t seem to care if his human resource department had demonstrated extreme incompetence or whether $800 in the whole was going to make christmas shopping a lot more difficult for me this year. And as for an apology, apparently the city manager feels I really need to take some of the responsibility for not noticing the mistake that took the trained payroll clerk over three months to spot. So, I have had an experience today, I am wiser and I have even less faith in our government officials than I ever did before.