What my cat thinks of my HR department

While on maternity leave, about 3 business days from the end of my 12-week  leave actually, I was home with the baby enjoying the last days and the phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and saw it was someone from my company but not a number of someone I recognized. I answered it anyway.

Simultaneously, the cat was eating her breakfast. Because we have a dog who would eat anything and everything in sight we put the cat's dish up on a book shelf where I keep our cookbooks. She jumps up, it's safe from the dog, it's a win / lose situation. The cat has her sanctuary in which to eat, the dog gets nothing unless the cat drops a kibble to tease him. The bookshelf butts up against our living room pass thru from the kitchen, so she can choose to jump down onto the kitchen floor or she can drive my husband crazy and walk across the back of his chair into the living room. It's a special treat when my husband is sitting in his chair and the cat wafts her long furry tail against my husband's neck and ear. He LOVES that!

Anyway, I answered the phone, the cat was finishing her food. The person on the other end of the phone was HR telling me I wasn't approved for more than 6 weeks of leave and why was I still out? As I was listening to her tell me I was in violation of my leave, the cat had to come down from her food area to the living room side of the pass thru. Except apparently breakfast did not agree with her because she started doing that "thing" cats do when they're about to hurl their cookies. You know, when they stand wide, get low to the ground, whisk their tail back and forth and make that horrendous sound? Yeah, that one. And by that sound you know that regurgitated food mixed with fur ball is about to come back out onto your carpet. Only this time, the cat only made it as far as the back of my husband's chair before making that noise. And I was holding the phone in one hand with HR on the other end of the line and the baby in my other arm.

Unfortunately there is now an HR staff member who has way more of a glimpse into my personal life than I am completely comfortable with. My only chance to save my husband's chair from cat hork was to tell the HR person to hold, throw the phone down, grab the poor cat by the scruff of her neck and hurl her to the floor and hold onto the baby for dear life without squishing him. The cat was positioned to aim right into the crevices of the back cushion and the arm.  Luckily, hork catastrophe averted. I managed to remove the cat from the back of my husband's chair without so much as a speck of throw up getting on it. Go me! But now I was left to explain why I threw the HR person across the room and told her to hold on. And well, since she was about to ruin my day, I figured what did I have to lose by telling her I was juggling a baby, the phone and cat that was about to hork up a fur ball.

When I got back to work and was able to sit down with HR and get to the bottom of all their issues, they managed to lose an email I sent them with the forms I had to fill out before I left in FEBRUARY… AAAAAAAND they managed to screw up my vacation time they paid out to me. I had well over 100 hours saved up for maternity leave. I asked them to save me 5 days time so I wasn't left with nothing upon returning. They managed to completely deplete my time and then an additional 47 hours. The first email and phone call I came back to was another person from HR telling me they were going to short pay my next paycheck(s) until I had paid them back for the time they mistakenly deducted from me. Fortunately MOST…not all, but MOST of that 47 hours was a clerical error. They managed to take out an entire 80 hours of time from my paycheck on March 11^th, which would be the working time period from 2/19 thru 3/4. My last day of work was 2/28. That would make it only 4 days (32 hours worth) of vacation time I was taking in that pay period. Bottom line was they still screwed up by applying my vacation time to my leave like they did, but now I only owed them back less than 10 hours, instead of almost 50. Why can't competent people be hired into HR…just wondering?

I like to think the cat was just telling me what she thought of the HR folks. Throw up...yeah, that's about what i think of them too. I am VERY glad I managed to save my husband's chair form the cat's wrath though. It would not have been pretty. Our cat would've felt my husband's wrath for sure. I made sure HR felt my wrath and displeasure with their "mistakes". How can they do that to an employee and not understand the ramifications? It is truly maddening. Fortunately, it mostly worked out but not without giving me a heart attack.