Pay slip

I got paid yesterday.

By the Chinese university I've been doing some teaching at for the past month.

Yes, I should be deliriously happy.  Pleasantly surprised.  Mightily relieved.

And I am, I am.

Except that.... the 'payslip' they'd prepared for me (a flimsy sliver of tickertape, which really did not have room for the signature they wanted from me, and which could not possibly have been subsequently 'filed' in anything other than a wastepaper bin) was so bizarrely CONFUSING that I did find myself becoming more than a tad irritated.

I think they spelled my name correctly - that was something.

But they'd forgotten (or lost, or chosen not to use, for some obscure and nefarious reason) the passport number I'd supplied to them, and so had substituted a Chinese ID number (ostensibly that of one of the Chinese members of staff, but, I suspect, entirely made up).

The headline rate of pay quoted was marginally less than I had been promised.  And it did not accord either with the "pre-tax" figure cited, or with the amount they were actually paying me.

It seems that what they had done - to try to spare me the vexation of having "tax" deducted - was to calculate what I would have had to earn in order to receive the promised fee post-tax (not that they actually paid any tax for me, of course; this is all smoke-and-mirrors).  Now, Chinese tax calculations can be pretty abstruse at the best of times; but on this occasion.... well the amount of "tax" calculated was way more than it should have been on standard income tax rates (since the first 1,500 rmb or so of monthly income is supposed to be tax-exempt).  And it was slightly less than the amount they'd actually deducted - according to the payslip (again, the figures did not quite add up!).  And I think even the amount of cash I did receive was slightly different to the headline figure I was ostensibly receiving - they'd rounded up or down or something...

Just to add a little further to the muddle... I'd been told I was only going to be paid for the first two weeks of classes.  And the girl who paid me insisted that I was being paid only for two weeks.  I eventually managed to puzzle out that I was in fact being paid for three weeks.

So, I was being paid more than I'd expected in total (presumably they'll pay me a 'short month' next time to make up for it); but less than I'd been promised as an hourly rate (only a very little less, but bothersome nonetheless, since it quickly adds up when you're doing 4 hours a week; and 250 rmb per hour has long been my minimum get-out-of-bed threshold - I really do not like working for even a few kuai less than that!).

WHY can't things ever be simple in China??