Money, the root of all evil

Good thing it's the beginning of the semester (still have tons of student loan money sitting in savings) and the beginning of the month (most bills not due till after mid-month for me), because I don't have a paycheck for January. We're suppose to get paid the last working day of the month, which would have been yesterday, so I sat down this morning to balance my checkbook, get all the bill payments ready to go, etc. But when I logged into my bank account there was no paycheck! So I logged onto the employee system for OSU - and I don't have a payroll advice for the month either. Being Saturday, there is of course no way to straighten this out till Monday, but I'm hoping that payroll just got behind because the school was shut down for three days earlier this week and will be running a little late. Otherwise it means I didn't have anything submitted for the month, and last time that happened their response was pretty much a gee-sorry-we'll-pay-you-double-next-time kind of a thing.

And on top of that, my tuition waiver paperwork got lost, so that hasn't processed either. There are two others in the department with the same issue. The graduate college tried to blame it on us and say we never turned the forms in, but (a) I distinctly remember turning it in and (b) the department secretary has me checked off as having turned it in. So either the department lost a couple of our forms while getting everyone else's in, the graduate college lost them, or whoever entered the info screwed it up.

So that's slightly over $2000 that should be in my bank account but is not! Like I said, it's hardly a crisis for me since I've got plenty sitting in savings right now, but I know that isn't the case for everyone. One of the guys whose tuition waiver was lost doesn't take out student loans (he has a wife who works, but they also have kids and still live pretty tight from what he's said - he's the poor guy eating pb&j when all the still single students go out for lunch), so he's had to pay his tuition out of pocket and is waiting to get reimbursed - imagine if he doesn't have a paycheck either!