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Comment by cyberferret | Hacker News Reader

All Government departments in my city start at 08:00 and finish at 16:21 !! No weirdness about the finishing time though - it is just so that the fortnightly pay run ends on an even hourly number.

UPDATE: It seems that nearly all state and federal public services in Australia have strange knock off times... [0]

[0] - http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/2014/06/industrial-action-fo...

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> so that the fortnightly pay run ends on an even hourly number

How isn't that already the case with 10 x 8 hour days? or 8.5 etc?

Your linked article mentions another interesting idea: that an additional 9 minutes a day is more than 5 days a year.

I used to work for a medium sized company (~500 staff) that made us all work 10 extra minutes each day "off the clock", but then gave it back in the form of a number of whole and half days throughout the year when the company would be closed for business. Usually that meant that we'd get an extra day off before a long weekend or bank holiday, an additional day before christmas, that sort of thing. This was on top of 33 days of paid annual leave, so a sweet deal.

My bad - It is not to make an even hour at the end of the fortnight. I asked a public service friend of mine and he said because there was an odd number of hours that our public servants had to work per fortnight (as the article I posted also pointed out). I assume it all works out evenly over 365.25 days or something? I've never worked in the public service, so cannot speak for their methods.

Another Darwinite, I presume? "Fourtwennyone" is more than a contract, it's a cultural institution.

You presume correctly! :) All I know is that if I am in the city having meetings, I try and jump in the car and head the heck out by 4:20 in order to beat the "public service exodus traffic jam"...

Ah yes, the famous rush quarter-hour.

I'm going to be visiting Darwin in February. Who has the best chicken laksa these days? I haven't found any good ones here.

A straw poll among my friends say that Rendezvous cafe in the Star Village is still the pick for Laksa, or Linda's(?) stall at the Parap Markets on Saturday... :)

My basic plan was to hit one of the markets and just eat all of them.

God I wish I could bottle it.

Victorian countryside government offices finish at 5:06 pm. It is due to 36.8 hours work week. Absolutely strange.

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