Paycheck drama

If you were on facebook this weekend, you may know that I had a little incident with my paycheck. An envelope that had both my most recent paycheck+paystub, along with two previous paystubs, fell directly into our shredder (on the "auto-shred" setting). Luckily, I reacted fairly quickly, stopping the shredder and then extracting the remaining documents before more than just about a corner of each item was eaten up, but it was still horrifying. I sort of sat there in shock for a few minutes trying to figure out a) how it happened (I obviously have exceptional klutzy aim and really bad luck) and b) how significant it was.

This sounds really funny right now (and thank you, all who "liked" my FB status update... this one needed a "dislike" button), but, having just gotten reimbursed for the hospital OB work I'd done so far, I was really stressed about how the partially-shredded check should be handled. I generally do direct deposit, but, due to some changes in our directed retirement contributions (to catch up to all of you who actually have been making money for several years; I think the payroll department knows my name pretty well), there is some lag in the direct deposit mechanism (it usually takes a pay period or so) and so I have gotten a few actual checks. From now on, I am going to avoid that at all costs, due to this unfortunate near-catastrophe.

As you can see from the picture above [the back of the check, for obvious reasons], only a portion of the check got shredded; the information missing was the actual check number (which actually could be ascertained from the attached stub), but the entire amount, the employer's name, and my name were all intact. Thankfully, our local bank accepted the check without a problem although the clerk looked at me with a weird expression (I'm not sure she'd ever had a request to deposit a shredded check), had to check with her manager, and then tried to hide her smile...

Thankfully, I didn't have to go to the payroll lady on my knees to beg for a replacement check (as I'm pretty sure she's annoyed with me from all the changes we've made to our contributions). I'm hoping to lay low for a while and have no further payroll incidents. And I might put our shredder on the neutral setting for now... until I actually intend to shred something.