The idea of February 29th is a cute concept in some ways. It's quadrennial appearance has notoriety, and is a date often targeted by expectant mothers and fathers who think they can keep their children artificially young, by limiting the number of birthdays over their lifetime. But if you think about it, if you're a salaried employee, the very fact we have a February 29th this year means your employer gets this day for free. In fact, every single paycheck you get this year is less because of February 29th, and they never even asked your permission to dock your pay!

What do I mean by this? Well, in 2007, we had 365 days, in 2008, we have 366, and next year, we will have 365. Yet you're paid the same this year, if you're on salary, even though you put in the extra effort!

To make the math easy, let's pretend your salary is such that you take home exactly $73,000 a year. Under this scenario, in 2007, you would take home $200.00 even per day, but in 2008, for the same amount of work, you'd only be taking home $199.45. And those 55 cents can add up. Over the 366-day calendar, your employer has taken away a full day's pay from you. If instead you take home $109,500, that number jumps to $300 in lost pay for similar productivity! (See below chart)


Over time, a few cents a day starts to add up...
And you can see this in every single one of your paychecks. If you get paid over a 14-day pay period, at the $73,000 rate noted above, you would see only $2,792.30 coming home every two weeks, instead of the $2,800.00 you would have received in either 2007 or 2009. That's messed up, right? You think we want to be reminded 26 times this year that employers worldwide have asked us to come into the office and work for free?

I propose that from now on, all salaried employees should have the option of taking February 29th off. After all, if we aren't getting paid, why show up?

Though the games still don't count for a month or so, we're excited to know the Oakland A's are getting the spring training campaign started today, with a noon game against the Milwaukee Brewers. It's been far too long to go without baseball, and we can't wait to resume our regularly scheduled obsession with the Green and Gold. My wife and I have a trip planned in the second full week of March to head down to Arizona for our third consecutive year, and that should be a lot of fun. Until we're down there, though, we'll be staying tuned to Athletics Nation for A's news, rumors and game live blogging.

Hope you don't mind our occasional forays into fandom. I was an A's fan decades before I got really into RSS feeds and link sharing!

If confronted with this empty space in your crossword puzzle, there are undoubtedly a wide array of solutions. But two featured prominently for me yesterday: Boston and Brogan. On the East Coast for a business trip, I notified my Twitter stalkers followers I was flying out Tuesday, and I got a somewhat in jest reply from social networking maven Chris Brogan and Boston area native, who wrote, "What's the plan?"

After connecting with him via e-mail and phone, I got the opportunity to bring Chris and a few friends to last night's Boston Celtics game, where they beat LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers by the score of 92-87, in a game that didn't seem all that close.

Though there was a game on, I got the opportunity to learn a lot about what makes Chris tick, what applications and Web services he's most jazzed about, and, continuing on this week's theme, evangelizing FriendFeed, which he joined last night. It was a pleasure getting to know Chris, sharing stories, and personally connecting with someone I already respected online. I believe when these opportunities present themselves, we should take advantage of them, so I appreciate Chris' taking time out of his busy schedule on short notice.

This open offer doesn't just stand for Chris. If you're out of town and visiting the Bay Area, or you find out I'll be in your area, please do contact me and let's see what we can do!

Screen Capture of http://www.blogrunner.com/ at 9:15 a.m. PST

Now this I like. Can't beat the company...

Also see: Blogrunner Likes Me, TechMeme Hates Me from December 2007.