Hours for the Dummy Worker

time and work

One of the items on the checklist our staffers use for nominating DotD candidates is something we call "failure of logic." That's a failing that most often seems to come from a lack of real-world experience, which may be why we often see that box ticked for freelancers who are still fumbling their way through college liberal arts degrees. Some, however, should know better, like eHowian Matt McGew, who claimed close to two decades of  journalism experience when he penned "How to Calculate How Many Hours You Have Worked" for BizFluent.com.

The staffer who first found this post had some trouble figuring out what the OQ might have meant, but McGew plunged right in:

"Hourly employees typically receive a set compensation for every hour worked. If you are an hourly employee, you can calculate the number of hours you have worked in a pay period by dividing by the gross wages received for a pay period by the hourly rate of pay you receive."

Yup, that's how Matt decided to address the question, and his directions were – to be kind – simplistic:

1. Determine gross pay
2. Determine hourly wage
3. Divide gross pay by hourly wage

Well, actually, McGew started out by telling his readers that step one is,

"Look at your paystub [sic] to determine your gross hourly wages for a specific pay period..."

...which, frankly, makes no sense at all: what are "gross hourly wages," anyway? And more to the point, who ever saw a pay stub that didn't include the number of hours worked (not to mention things like overtime, commissions, etc.)? No one, that's who.

With that in mind, we suspect that the question was not as cut-and-dried as Matt seemed to think, but was something altogether different. Here are two possibilities:

• Elementary addition of time, e.g., "If you worked 3 hours 30 minutes on Monday, two hours 45 minutes on Tuesday, five hours fifteen minutes on Wednesday... how many total hours did you work?" That's the kind of arithmetic a grade-schooler might be asking about.
• Combining preset times for tasks, e.g., "If you replace a radiator at 1 hour and 30 minutes and R&R two CV joints at 45 minutes each, how many hours do you charge the customer?"

As for McGew's "answer," it's just plain stupid; not to mention that our Dumbass of the Day clearly didn't think through the question... much less his answer. That's why the boy has just collected his fourth award.

copyright © 2018-2022 scmrak

MM - TIME