Ah. The joys of payroll.

I posted this elsewhere sometime ago, and meant to double post to here, but never got round to it and lost the link. Found it today (thanks Google).

10 ways to nark off your payroll department

I work for a large payroll company and I'm currently working on a payroll that is a rather well known utilities company in the UK. For those inexperienced with contacting payroll, here are 10 easy ways of getting your payroll clerk aggravated:

1. A convo on the lines of this:Employee: "I'm paying too much tax." Me: "Have you handed in your P45?" Employee: "No. Do I have to?"
2. Rant. And Rant. And Rant. And swear. It don't get you anywhere honey. My trick is to hold the phone away from my ear until you've finished. I can't understand a word you're saying anyway. Other tactics, include, at best, terminating the conversation. At worst, putting you on speaker so the Payroll Manager can hear. PM has hot line to top man (or woman) at client. So be warned and watch your language.
3. Holding your baby whilst on the phone and allowing it to BAWL down the phone so I cannot hear a word you're saying, and yours and my blood pressure goes up. Oh yeah, I can do without Sky Sports on in the background too. Turn it off!
4. Telling me your life story, your latest operation, the troubles with your daughter, son, husband, wife, partner. It won't get the sympathy vote - the client doesn't pay us to cause sympathy to make us change the rules. I'm sorry for you - honestly - but it will not cause any change in the stance. Tell your sob story to your boss - HE can probably make things happen. We can't.
5. Tell me how to do my job, or tell me you could DO my job. One woman tried to teach me the joys of customer service (somewhere along the line of the customer is always right). The biggest laugh I got was when I was at the lower end of the pay scale (around £5) per hour and had an employee in a shop (on £3 per hour) telling me that payroll was easy and she could do my job, and indeed, HAD done my job. Right, lady, so why didn't you stay in payroll rather than be on your feet ALL day for £2 less an hour?
6. Tell me its MY job to chase up YOUR personal information. No. Its you or your manager. Beck and call girls (and boys) we are not.
7. Phone up at 9am on pay day, consultant unavailable, other consultant takes your phone number promising I will phone you back....you phone back at 9:30am demanding to know why I haven't phoned back. We get close to 200 phone calls on pay day, and your call stating that your union dues balance is incorrect is NOT priority. Oh, and we have until 3pm the next working day to phone back UNLESS you've been severely underpaid.
8. Be on over £50K, be underpaid by the price of a Malteser, and DEMAND payment NOW. Since when should I pay you out of principle, when I have a girl who's been underpaid SEVERELY, which was maybe ours, maybe the client's fault, and they say - its OK, I can wait. You high paid employees should be ASHAMED.
9. Say "I bet your pay is never wrong". Oh boy. Of course my pay has been wrong on occasion, because, like yours, MY payroll department is human. I don't get on the phone and talk to them the way you talk to them. (They're too close for a start)
10. Say "My pay is wrong every month". Y'know, out of morbid curiosity, all payroll clerks check this statement out. We usually find that your pay was wrong one month (our fault), wrong the next month (because we fixed our error, and the client, out of 'kindness' or some form of weird humour, instruct us to do something specific to fix it, so the correction is doubled up, and you're paid wrong again), and then....nowt. Rien. Nada. Your pay has been right 9 months in a row. Be careful again, we have the hot line to your boss and we record every query.

There are more. Much more. But these will do for now.