Red Tape + Unrelated Picture

UCC pays its employees monthly two business days prior to the end of the month. This makes last Thursday, June 26th, the first payday for our internship program. In theory, this was supposed to be the day on which my coworkers and I were paid for our first 2 weeks of work. However, things do not always go according to plan (or, in this case, theory). All the Irish students got their pay on Thursday as scheduled. For the international students such as myself, however, things were not so simple.

When my international coworkers and I first started work, we were sent down to the social security office in Cork to apply for PPS numbers, the Irish equivalent of a SSN. Everyone who works in Ireland is required to have a PPS number, so we cannot be paid until we get a PPS number. The Irish government being a normally functioning slothlike bureaucracy, our PPS numbers have not come yet. They are allegedly coming "soon", but I'm not exactly sure if a government employee's idea of soon and my idea of soon are the same thing. Regardless, we don't get paid until the PPS numbers arrive because we technically aren't doing any paid research at UCC until we have PPS numbers.

And here is a completely unrelated picture of the Irish countryside a short way northwest of Cork city around Blarney.