Deployment per diem comes in

I finally got my deployment per diem today -- over a year after I returned from Afghanistan. Part of that's my fault -- I wasn't perfectly diligent about making sure my paperwork was straight when I got back. Of course, I believe the *majority* of the fault stills lies with the system.

Back in November/December 2011, the problem was that I wasn't submitting the amendments to my orders. (If they could tell I was missing them, why didn't they just pull them up themselves?)

Then, for three months in early 2012, I submitted the paperwork and received the confirmation only to find out they never processed it. What I thought was a long processing delay was simply a dropped ball.

Then, a couple times, it was a missing or incorrect field. I fixed those. (But again, if they know what the right code is, why not just fix it themselves? And why didn't they tell me about that before?)

During the summer my XO duties distracted me from  trying again more than once, but I picked things up around September. By this time, though, I had signed as my own reviewer -- when that got kicked back I had one of my classmates sign. (At this point, I had to wonder what the point was to having a reviewer -- none of us know what we're doing anyway.)

It took several more attempts to realize that I couldn't just do corrections -- that my new form was getting ignored whenever "they" saw my old one was still in the packet, but it finally went through on January 28th.

The confirmation email said it would take eight business days to process, but February 8th came and went without any news. I called the help center, and they said processing times were pushing the 11-12 day range. (Why don't they adjust the confirmation email?)

Then the 13th came and went. When I called on the 15th, the help center person said that payment had been authorized and that I would get it the next day. Sure enough, it did.

I was surprised to see how much it was -- my impression was what it was going to be $3.50 per day for each day I was in theater, but it was more than that. I got $21.70 for each of the five days I was Kyrgyzstan, and $79.50 (75% of $106) for the first and last day (combined) of travel.

More poignantly, I got an extra $3.10 as "late payment interest."  Nice.