Hi everyone, I know this is going to be a dumb question, but I'm a 4th year med student on an ADT and I really haven't gotten familiar with all the paperwork terms, etc. yet. Anyway, on my orders for the month I have an amount of money listed under the "per diem" section - I know this means "per day" which I assume is the money allotted to cover food and miscellaneous things like that. My questions are (1) am I automatically paid the full amount under the per diem and (2) if not, how do I get this money? Thanks.
There is no such thing as a dumb question, as this website demonstrates:
http://despair.com/cluelessness.html
I am not really a money person...just my nature...but as I recall from last year...the per diem you get is arbitrarily assigned by some functionary deep within the bowels of Air Force finance...it depends on many factors, including phase of the moon, sunspot activity, and Paris Hilton's abstinence duration. In order to get your per diem, you have to submit a travel voucher to finance after your return from ADT, TDY, or any other TLA (Three Letter Acronym)...increasingly, on active duty, this is done electronically (at Andrews, they stopped accepting the paper version, because it interfered with the finance dweebs' ability to play Sudoku during duty hours). Once you submit a travel voucher (hopefully you saved all your receipts over X amount of dollars for reimbursement), the Gnomes of Zurich will deduct a capricious amount of money from what you should really be given (e.g., you paid the discounted conference rate of $250.00 for a $350.00 hotel room at a TDY where you were an invited lecturer at an international medical convention; when you submit your travel voucher, some finance dork looks up LAS VEGAS HOTELS in a database created by a trained proboscis monkey [Airman Nosusbiggus:
http://www.tustrucos.com/wallpapers/Animales/fondos-animales-Monos/Borneo-Proboscis-Monkey.jpg], and scribbles in $75.89 as the "allowed" reimbursement, given that the "average" cost of staying in Las Vegas must include the price for sleeping in a cardboard box you *could* have commandeered from a local domicile-challenged individual in a back alley; you are responsible for paying the difference between "actual" and "allowed" out of your own, personal, endlessly-deep pocket), and this pathetic amount of cash will be added to your pay (usually by electronic transfer nowadays, because paper checks involve a diminished Solitaire/work ratio in finance, which is only open from 0900 to 0930 on alternate Tuesdays during neap tide).
I am sure that my colleagues with greater financial wisdom will give you more accurate advice; I challenge them, however, to use Paris Hilton, proboscis, and the Gnomes of Zurich in the same paragraph without it seeming, um, absurd.
--
R
http://www.medicalcorpse.com
