Post #3936 J: Cheap Bastards

 Per Diem & Assorted Nonsense

I've never been comfortable spending other people's money. I've given numerous examples over the history of the blog, e.g.,

• In 1999, I commuted from Chicago to Santa Clara (near San Jose, CA). The CEO's administrative assistant told me (as a subcontractor) that I was authorized to spend up to $200/night for a local hotel room. I've never paid that rate in my life (to the present) and I thought it was absurd. I could get a room at an Extended Stay in a south San Jose suburb at about $43/night--even if it meant battling Highway 101 traffic to and from work.
• For the same client, I expensed groceries vs. eating out and drove a subcompact. I found an airline that flew round trips at about $450, although I could have padded my UAL mileage perk account at double or triple the fare. 
• At a recent relative's funeral, we were told the estate would cover the hotel bills of family members. For some weird reason, there was a run on hotel rooms at that time in the summer with a prominent Hampton Inn charging over $270/night (I shit you not). I found a hotel in Somerset, MA (where my Dad grew up) for about $120/night--much cheaper than any other relative not local to the area.
• When I did training in Malvern, PA, I knew a colleague who went out to a sports bar every night and ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, the ribeye. (I ordered a mid-priced entree.)  In contrast when I did a gig for a Long Island community college, I went to a Boston Market for dinner and ran up a $12 tab--while the state per diem allowed a much higher total.

 On the other hand, I knew people who engaged in outright fraud. I've occasionally talked about a batshit crazy (among other things, he would walk around business offices in his bare feet and point out the underarm stains on his shirts), incompetent DBA on a Chicago city department project. But probably the incident that I remember more than this other stuff was the time we went to a McDonald's and he went around salvaging abandoned receipts (the idea, of course, being to expense a more expensive meal than he purchased and to pocket the difference. That's outright fraud.

But I've seen organizations that went beyond cheap to outright, unbelievably petty. I've probably mentioned the first, when I was a faculty member at UWM, but not the second, where I actually had a job offer withdrawn  2 days later.

At a DSI (academic) conference in Las Vegas, you could easily (at the time) buy an all-you-care-to-eat buffet for a nominal amount (like $3-4). One senior (south Asian background) professor was eating buffets, actually making money on the per diem he was claiming (something I consider unethical). I decided to eat at a buffet before my return trip to Milwaukee. It turned out the flight served something the size of a slider that they loosely called a meal  The  college had a policy of not allowing reimbursement if the flights were shown serving meals; I don't even think I checked whether the flight was serving food. So they refused to reimburse the last buffet, although my expense report was well below per diem and had full receipts. It wasn't the $3-4 but the principle of the thing. When they wouldn't budge, I decided to reverse tactics and now demanded to be paid per diem. "You can't do that." "Why?" "We've seen your receipts!" That was totally irrelevant, of course. Just because other people didn't submit receipts didn't mean they weren't doing the same thing. I was getting punished for telling the truth. They finally agreed to reimburse the buffet, and I dropped the per diem claim.

But in the late 1990's I was all but offered  a managerial position at a (new) Oracle consulting/partner office in Chicago. I was working with recruiters; there was one last part of the deal, described as a mere formality, a face-to-face with folks in their home base of New Orleans. When you talk expenses, it probably was well north of $600 if you add parking, flight, hotel, meals, etc. What I remember is that someone was supposed to join me for breakfast (and expense the meal).  So I was on my own and would have to pay the meal. (I didn't know the area and other places to eat.) So this was a pricey hotel; you could get a continental breakfast for about $7, or order a buffet breakfast for about $11. I figured with a full day of interviews I would go for a hearty breakfast. Perhaps I should have seen the fact of the no-show as ominous; I thought the interviews went well, but when I got back to Chicago, it seems someone blackballed me for unspecified reasons.

My attitude on expense reports was the least the prospective employer should do is reimburse my out-of-pocket costs, including my no-show breakfast. It's not like I got briefed on what to do if someone no-showed at a breakfast meeting. Finally, some idiot accountant rejected my expense report on the grounds that $11 exceeded the company's per diem policy. Well, idiot, it's not like I picked that hotel, that I was the no-show interviewer who would put the meal on his corporate card, I had not been briefed on expense rules before coming, and I was NOT an employee.  It was bad enough the job fell through, but now I had to put up with this bureaucratic asshole, who, I shit you not, was acting like I should be grateful I got an expenses-paid vacation to New Orleans. 

The accountant wouldn't budge, and so I decided to pull a move that I knew would be seen as provocative, suggesting maybe I should bill them for the hours I spent in New Orleans. That didn't go over well and may have burned bridges with my supporters, but at that point, I didn't care; it's not like they were going to hire me in the future.

I did get reimbursed, but it may have been my recruiters.

Believe it or not, there's a second chapter to this story. Another 2-3 years later (year 2000), I was living miserably in California, and a Chicago-based manager for the same company started recruiting me aggressively while I was working on a Los Angeles project. They still insisted on doing the face-to-face thing, although they were okay with my doing it at a Denver facility. (Did they stiff me on reimbursements later? Yup. I think parking and transportation in Denver weren't reimbursed, the cheap bastards.) Only this time the result was different--I got the offer.

Then came one of the weirdest things I've ever heard of, even beyond my experience. Within  2 days, I got overnighted a cancellation of the job offer. It seemed like some cheap bastard accountant remembered my name, and the back office went batshit crazy.

Do I regret seeing the nasty side of a prospective employer sooner than letter? No. The same thing could have happened 3 weeks into the job after relocation. But seriously under what circumstances do you make an employee decision over a breakfast check? It goes beyond pettiness.