They say.....things come in threes. Well here's the third problem I had when I first traveled north.
The two previous posts dealt with amazing transportation snags and a housing surprise. This time it's money.
Everybody knows that there's big money in the north. In my case my salary would be about one and a half times more. It was part of my decision to go north but certainly not the only one.
I left home with $200.00 in my pocket. In 1963 it was a good sum of money. This would easily carry me until I got my first check.
Well, I went to the post office on the day the checks were supposed to come and there was nothing in my mail box. The teachers who were on last year all got checks , but the new guys didn't get checks. The govt. wouldn't or couldn't give us an advance. So there I was with very little money in my pocket. You really didn't need any money. Well, you had to buy smokes and beers. Well, everybody knows those things could be omitted. I bought bread and milk which were very expensive. I wasn't going to bake bread. A loaf of bread was very expensive.
So I wrote Dad to take $200.00 out of my account and send me cash.
So October we head to the post Office on check day and you guessed it no checks for the new guys. I got my first check in November. Of course it was 3 checks at once.
Not getting the pay check was stressful. It wasn't too bad for me but more difficult for married people.
I understand why the check was late but it still hurt. The office where we were paid from was 5000 miles away in Ottawa. All our qualifications had to be sent away and assessed and then payment made. We also had a government austerity program at that time. The government cut staff and you guessed they didn't have enough people to figure out what to pay us. We also didn't have a phone line to the outside. We had a local telephone system but no long distance. I'm sure the govt. would have heard a few things if we had long distance service.
So things began to improve after these three mishaps.
