A termination in time costs nine

I'm discovering more ramifications from my April 30th "termination".

I had thought everything was cleared up and I was only waiting for the premature April 30th "accrued but unused" vacation pay to be reversed. But late yesterday I received an e-mail from Fidelity: "Your online confirmation is available". Fidelity runs our pension, 401(k) and stock option plans. Odd. I had not performed any transactions.

Turns out I was 1/3 vested in some stock options. The rules are if you are terminated, an extra 1/3 will vest. You lose anything remaining (in my case, the last 1/3 of the options). When I was "terminated" April 30th, Fidelity dutifully cashed out 1/3 of the remaining options and the rest vanished. If I actually end up being laid off Jun. 30th, all I will lose is the stock appreciation in those 60 days. But if I find another position in the bank and don't leave, they should not have taken that extra 1/3 (worth about $3000).

And there's more. I noticed my online timesheet was no longer working. When I go to enter time, it says: "No employees found" (nothing good can come of error messages like this). So I called the help desk. They told me that it takes eight business days for the "changes" (that I really am an employee) to reach Fidelity. "The problem is", he went on, "I'm not sure what will happen to your May 15th pay with no timesheet entries". In other words: no timesheet, no pay. That's just great.

The only saving grace in all this: the HR guy that could have prevented all this - and didn't - is going to have a lot of work to do.

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