First job out of college (part 6)

In December, the volunteers were desperate for any money they could collect which reminds me of another source of great consternation on my first job. Typically, I had thought that the end of my problems is when the checks were printed. After the checks were printed, I could mail them out and within two or three days the volunteers would receive their payments and shut up for the most part. Often times, I’d hand over a stack of checks to my boss but then we would have to wait for a few days before we could mail them. My boss would then communicate with the government agency, and then the agency would send the money to his bank account. After we received the funding, we could then mail out the checks.

In the first couple of months, the agency was pretty good with sending us money on time. However, as the months dragged on, it seemed like it would take longer and longer for the agency to fund the money into our account. Timely funding would be receiving the money in one or two days however I remember instances where the agency took up to two weeks to fund us the money. During the Summer of 2011, there was a point where we had at least 3 batches of checks that had been printed but were just sitting in queue. And of course, the volunteers would call us on a daily basis asking us about the status of the payments. Now the most frustrating thing about this was that we had done everything on our part to serve the customer. The bottleneck was being caused by the agency. Could we tell that to the customer? No. That would make the agency look bad and they might be held accountable to some sort of standard. We could tell the customer that the check had been processed and printed but we couldn’t send it out because it had to be “authorized” first.

One thing we wanted to make sure to never do was send out any checks before we had complete funding. If that ever happened, then the checks we sent out would bounce. And unfortunately, that very thing happened in either December of 2010 or January of 2011. I’m not completely sure how it happened. Maybe I sent out a set of checks too early in the mail or maybe the boss received funding for one set of checks and gave us the go ahead to mail out a different set of checks. But during that time period, we sent out a set of checks and about half of them bounced while resulted in us having to reprocess the bounced checks and reimburse the volunteers for any bank fees they might have incurred. As much pain and agony as it was, one fortunate thing happened in January. I received a small pay raise.

When I was hired as a full time employee, my boss mentioned that I would receive a salary increase after three months on the job. This was granted to be an incentive to stick with the company. My paycheck increase from $500 weekly to $550 weekly. A 10 percent increase was very nice. I was able to take home $445 dollars each week. During January 2011, I finished the month spending only about $550. I was very adamant about staying within the bench mark that I had set for myself.