Not Ever
What am I talking about?
HIVE has never, ever, missed a payment due. In the three years I've been on STEEM and now HIVE, the reward system has never failed me. Not once. Whatever I was supposed to get at payment time, I got. The payment is never late, or missed, or lost.
Nor, I'm very happy to say, is the payment miscalculated. I don't pretend to understand the complex math/algorithms involved in converting STU/HTU into SBD/STEEM/SP and HBD/HIVE/HP, but I feel reasonably assured that I received the amounts I am supposed to get based on the allocations accumulated at the pay point.
Unfortunately, I Can't Say The Same For Others
At the moment, I have no less than four situations—three are payments or earnings, the last one on a bill—that the individual organizations are either delaying or got wrong.
It's irritating. Not only does it cost them time and resources to hunt down whatever information on the matter they might have and then get it fixed, but it's costing me time and aggravation to ride roughshod.
I can't think of a single time where I needed to contact someone (whoever the heck that might be) to get the HIVE reward payout to work, or to get it corrected.
Never.
It just works.
Unemployment
I've been laid off for a second time this year thanks to COVID-19 restrictions in my state. Currently, of the eight counties I regularly work in, seven of them are still in extreme risk, which means, among many other things, all bars and restaurants are not allowed, under the threat of fines (and the real probability of enforcement), to have dine-in customers. They can set up areas outside for patrons, but otherwise, it's takeout or delivery.
The machines I collect money from and help to maintain are inside, not outside. That means income from those machines are way down. Since that is the case, there's less for me to do, hence being laid off.
While I have been working, I've been under the income limit and receiving unemployment for the last four weeks. This week, I filed like I normally do, checking the appropriate boxes and filling in the earnings information. After heading to another screen where it allows me to verify my answers, I hit submit. I arrived at the finalization screen where it tells me to wait 30 minutes and then check back to make sure the form was received.
I waited a little over 30 minutes and went back. I was told my claim was not available because I had not submitted it yet. I thought maybe I'd cut the window too close and waited another 30 minutes. When I went back again, same answer.
I waited another 15 minutes and then decided I'd better fill it out all over again. I didn't want to wait longer and then not have a claim filed. So, I went in, checked the boxes and filled in the data for a second time, verified, hit submit. Again it told me it had received it and I waited yet another 30 minutes to check back.
This last time around, I was told the unemployment office did indeed have my claim request and to check back on Tuesday to make sure all was well.
That's today, and unfortunately, all is not well. The page I get to when I log in just tells me that there was something wrong with my submission and that I'll be receiving something in the mail so I can take care of it.
Whatever it is.
It doesn't tell me what's specifically wrong. The only other information I have is that the claim has not been processed yet.
If I had to guess, it's one of three things.
User error. I've done these enough times, I'm reasonably sure my information is good, but I'm not going to rule it out.
They have the info twice. Maybe the first submission actually did go through along with the second and they don't know what to do with it. Which is dumb, since they would be identical to each other, but hey, it's the state government bureaucracy I'm dealing with here. The unemployment department hasn't had a systems update since the 80s.
Four weeks are up. This is my personal odds on favorite to be the problem. When I reopened the claim in early December, there was a question about how long I thought I might be laid off. Well, that's impossible to know, but I couldn't leave the answer blank. Plus, it specifically says it can't be more than four weeks, anyway, so I put in four weeks. Again, it's dumb, especially since there's all kinds of exceptions being made in the whole unemployment process thanks to what the Covid-19 restrictions are doing to businesses and therefore actual employment in Oregon.
So, I'm hoping the letter will come tomorrow, or that they realize the problem is with their online system. I went to check just now and this is what I got:
Oh, and that new federal unemployment money ($300 this go around) from the stimulus bill just passed? It's in limbo as the state is waiting for instructions on how to properly dispense it.
Paycheck
As I said, I've been working. According to my time sheets, I have nearly 27 hours due for the pay period, which is November 26-December 25. On December 3, I was supposed to be paid for Thanksgiving and a little over five hours of work done on the days in between, but only got paid eight hours, which were classified as work hours, rather than holiday. At the time, I told the office manager that it looked like they paid me the holiday but called it work hours, and that I was short the five or so hours of actual work. I also told her to just go ahead and wait to pay it with the rest of whatever I worked since December 3.
Well, that payment hit our checking account yesterday, and it too was wrong. Once again, I got paid for eight hours. This time, it was classified as holiday pay. I'm not sure why the payroll company did that. In the app I keep track of hours on, I wasn't paid for Christmas because I was laid off way before that, nor will I get paid for New Year's Day next month. So, I don't have any idea what the eight hours of holiday pay are for.
I told the office manager what happened and was told that the general manager had been messing around with things and that it was all screwed up (she used another word). I went back and looked at my time sheets, tallied up the amounts and then sent her a text with screenshots of the time sheets. She told me she'd have to go back and figure out what the payroll company did.
To me, it's rather obvious. Someone at the payroll company messed up. It's not the first time they've gotten the amount wrong or delayed my money all together. They've been on the job now for less than a year and nearly every month since, there's been some sort of pay issue or delay. I'm getting tired of.
I don't know how they're going to fix it, but for the pay period, I should have eight hours of holiday (for Thanksgiving only), and 26 hours and 53 minutes worth of earnings for work. I've been paid eight hours of work, and eight hours of holiday. That leaves 18 hours and 53 minutes unaccounted for.
It's a pain. I find myself in a situation where we're not talking about a whole lot of money, and yet, I need every penny of it for bills.
Stimulus Money
Aside from the federal unemployment compensation that's supposedly forthcoming, there's the stimulus money ($600 per every adult and child in the household) hanging out there, too. Reports had the government wanting it out by the end of last week, which was ambitious, considering Friday was a holiday. So far, nothing has showed up in my checking account, and now it's Tuesday night.
I went looking for an article about it and learned that the IRS has a page where you can check on the status of your payment. You have to input your name, social security number and address, and then, it's supposed to tell you what's going on.
Here's the Get My Payment link in case you think might qualify and our interested in finding out what's going on.
Here's what I got when I put in my personal information:
Okay, so it sounds like the money is in the mail. No big deal, right? It could be here by the end of the week.
However, just above this announcement, there's the previous one from earlier in the year, where the money went directly into our checking account. So, why mail out a check?
I'm not one who's clamoring for the money (even if it sounds like I am). Obviously, though, I can use it, and the sooner the better. As far as all of this goes, I'd just as soon be working like I was before all of this mess occurred. Maybe I'd even have another raise or two by now. But, if they're going to muck around with people's livelihoods, and then turnaround and throw money at us, I consider myself, and anyone else who qualifies, as a much more worthy candidate for all of this borrowed imaginary money than any other wasteful program or project the federal government spends billions on otherwise.
The check's in the mail.
Yeah, whatever.
Xfinity Mobile
In a previous post I gave the Reader's Digest version of the four hours I spent with tech support on Christmas Day. If you missed that, basically, we upgraded iPhones and switched carriers. In doing so, the SIM cards got mixed up (their mistake), and in order to check that my wife's iPhone was working, a new phone number was created.
Her iPhone is working on the phone number she's always had, as is mine, but because the new phone number was created, the system now has conflicting information, and it's not giving my wife the discount on her phone. The discount was contingent on porting over the existing numbers from the previous carrier.
I was told at the time that it happened that a work ticket would be created so that the problem could be fixed and the discount applied. Apparently, that was a different department (perhaps billing, rather than technical support) or something the tech I was working with (affectionately known as Tech No. 4) didn't have authority to fix.
Either way, I've been checking my new Xfinity Mobile account on a daily basis to see if the work ticket was fixed yet, but so far, it's still not showing the discount.
I decided to call up today to see if I could find out the status. After being on the phone with yet another tech for about a half hour, half of which she had me on hold, I was told that yes, everything I had recounted her was documented, and yes, it appeared my wife should get the discount, but I would need to be transferred to someone else to get it done.
After I was on hold for a minute or two, an automated message came on saying that if I wanted to, I could opt out and wait for someone to call me without losing my place in line. Otherwise, I could wait on the phone—for an hour and forty minutes!
I decided not to opt out, since I haven't had luck with them calling me back, but fifteen minutes into it, I couldn't stand the wait any longer. Every minute there was another automated message telling me how grateful they were for my patience and that they were doing everything they could to get to me and that my wait time was still an hour and forty minutes.
So, I guess I will be calling again tomorrow, and potentially the next day, and the next one after that, if needs me, so I get this fixed. I only have until January 8 to make sure the discount is applied before the current billing cycle ends. Then, it sounds like it might be even more difficult to fix after that.
Other than tracking down an Xfinity Mobile billing department office (probably outsourced to Bangladesh or some such place), and pushing the buttons myself, I'm not sure what else to do.
Can We Just Start Using HIVE For Everything?
Man, wouldn't that be great?
Yes, yes it would.
And judging by how every other source of income currently in my life is going (horribly, terribly wrong), it can't happen soon enough.
Images sources—screenshots from the Hive Wallet page, Oregon Unemployment Department's website, the IRS website, and the Xfinity Mobile account billing page