I just learned that to get reimbursed by Université de Montréal you have to not only submit your boarding passes, but SCREENSHOTS OF YOUR ACTUAL FUCKING BANK ACCOUNT TRANSACTIONS for EACH ITEM you need to get reimbursed for.

The academic reimbursement process is total bullshit anyway (you give the university a loan for the trip you're taking on their behalf), but this is next level. Even when I was a federal employee it was simpler. FUCK. THIS. SHIT.

@sundogplanets Meanwhile in tiny corporate:
Yeah, I paid this much in credit card bills. Tax write-off.

@sundogplanets The whole giving your employer a loan thing is really stupid in the first place. It is absolutely normal to pay hundreds of Euros yourself to get reimbursed with the next paycheck. That means you have to have the money in the bank account to pay in this expense, and the company gets to earn more interest/play with stocks with the money they had while you paid. It's stupid.

@sundogplanets

The main role of bureaucrats it to create burdens on users to justify the existence of their working places (and salaries, of course).

@sundogplanets I can spend $300,000 on a piece of lab equipment, but god forbid I want to get reimbursed for a train ticket. The audit requirements for travel are a nightmare.

@rootsandcalluses @sundogplanets I had a privately owned and paid for 'BahnCard' which entitled me to reduced prices for travelling by train in Germany. My uni not only took these reductions for granted they even reminded me each year by email that I should not forget to renew.

@maikek @rootsandcalluses @sundogplanets good grief.

@nxskok @maikek @rootsandcalluses It's all absurd. I paid a lot of money for plane tickets and hotel rooms for this trip a couple months ago. I'm grateful that now I'm in a position where that's fine, I can do that, but there have definitely been long stretches of my life where that would have destroyed me financially. It's wild that students are routinely asked to do this.

@sundogplanets I had to do this with telephone bills many years ago. What a hassle to black out names and numbers.
You might fuck with them and turn in receipts for goat/chicken feed instead. Do it.

@sundogplanets ~30 years ago at a small software company I worked for they sent a support engineer to a remote city to service a client. A Fri-Wed flight + 5 nights hotel was cheaper than Mon-Wed flight + 2 nights hotel so they asked employee if that was OK. He said sure. During the boring weekend he bought a chocolate bar and a newspaper and expensed them. Was refused because "not business related". Guess who never agreed to a cheaper flight option again?

@sundogplanets It's just something that makes it even harder for those already struggling... We are fine, too, but I remember times when a couple hundred bucks would have meant issues with food...

@nxskok @maikek