I expect you will make a decision based on fact rather then emotion.

I think you may have missed some of my posts.

Seriously, I talked to my manager when he (finally) came in today, and he was flummoxed at the raise I got. It turns out that there's a standard maximum 15% raise for state contractors. Now, I'd talked with my manager before and he agreed that I was making almost nothing, so he went out of his way to reclassify my job.

Somehow, his boss forgot the objective of all of that and limited me to that 15% raise. Once my manager got a hold of him again, he agreed that that was not right and called back the contracting agency and told them (and me, too) that they should resubmit me at a ``fair'' rate.

Now, though, I'm having the problem of coming up with what's a ``fair'' rate. I've not been making one for a while and the last time I did have one, it was before the dot-bomb exploded. So I'm having to take my agency's word for it. They're going to resubmit me so that I'll be making about $30/hr. Not as much as I'd like, but wildly more appropriate, I think. But I won't know if the State considers that fair until at least tomorrow. It's possible that it might even be more than that.

So, to make a long story short (chime in here), it looks like it was a big bureaucratic snafu that might well be fixed very soon. (And I know what you're thinking -- ``A bureaucratic snafu? In State Government? Never!'' All I can do is assure you that that's actually the case. )