Sometimes the shenanigans that come up in an episode of Stargate make me wonder about SGC HR and payroll.
Like, okay, so in Holiday Machello body-swaps with Daniel and then goes out and buys lunch for a bunch of random people in a diner. With Daniel's credit card. Now, I mean, maybe you can just call up the credit card company and say, "I didn't authorize this purchase," but if it was a large purchase, and it seems it probably was, the diner will probably challenge the chargeback, and they almost certainly have Daniel on camera. So like, how is this handled? Does Daniel just have to eat the cost? Budgeting for his credit card bill while cursing Machello for stealing his body and $500 worth of milkshakes? Or does the SGC have like. Insurance. For that sort of thing. Given the nature of the Goa'uld it's not unreasonable. $10 per paycheck and if your body gets hijacked by some kind of alien malevolence and spends all your money the Air Force will just quietly settle the bill in the event you survive and get your body back.
In A Matter of Time most of the SGC experiences a single day, but outside, two weeks go by due to the time dilation effects of the black hole. Some scrooge in payroll is patting themselves on the back for months for managing to successfully argue that everyone inside the mountain should only be paid for the time they actually experienced working, instead of the full two weeks of real time that they were at work. They severely regret it when Window of Opportunity rolls around and Jack and Teal'c scrape together the evidence that they experienced work for 2,160 hours in a single day.
#listen i just want an episode where daniel takes some alien shit back to his apartment to work on translating it#and it gets stolen by some rando thief#and he has to spend the whole episode arguing with his insurance company and the cops about the value of the stolen artifact#its just like a book or something. no impending explosions or alien invasions. its not dangerous#the only thing thats lost by it being stolen is the thing itself#insurance company wants evidence of it being a priceless historical artifact that may be our only insight into a lost culture#cops refuse to prioritize it until he can prove its actually valuable#he cannot mention the stargate to either of them#jack: well you know it wasnt exactly a life or death situation daniel#daniel: it was about to be one if officer matthews called me an out of touch first edition hoarder again#jack: thats ridiculous. you dont hoard first editions (tags by OP)
I love. All of this. Scrolling back up to see if there’s anyone on this thread that I haven’t already followed because this is the kind of Fandom Shit I love. What IS the policy for purchases made during body snatching? Does Jackson get a payout on his life insurance policy EVERY time he dies? If Teal’c and O’Neill experienced 2160 hours of work, does that include any holidays that would have ordinarily happened in that time frame? Is Colorado a state that pays time and a half for overtime plus a dollar per hour for overnight? Did they have to submit a timesheet of the hours they actually worked on fucking LEARNING ANCIENT versus pottery or interstellar golf, or was it all considered work because they couldn’t leave?
It’s so fun to rewatch, especially the early seasons, and count up all the precautionary procedures that must be going on behind the scenes. Every team coming back through the gate has to be targeted by three different weapons to make sure they aren’t carrying Gould larvae, dimension hopping insects, or have been implanted with sleeper agent assassination instructions. They have to walk through a decontamination hallway of fourteen different kinds of radiation and have half a pint of blood drawn to check for pathogens. The real reason any SG team only has like one mission per week or more is because they have to build up their red blood cell count for the re-entry testing. Any budding romances between team members are immediately public because of the mandatory zatar testing.
And then imagine you’re fucking INJURED and have to run the re-entry gamut
God I love Stargate
