Inadvertently watching it become 1 am again.
Microsoft sent me an offer, and instead of the hourly rate I asked for, they gave me this multi-tiered schedule which looks like this:
$a per hour with health insurance, vacation/sick leave and holiday pay
$b per hour with vacation/sick leave and holidays, EXCLUDING health insurance
$c per hour with health insurance and holidays, EXCLUDING vacation/sick leave
$d per hour with vacation/sick leave, EXCLUDING health insurance and holidays
$e per hour with health insurance, EXCLUDING vacation/sick leave and holidays
$f per hour with holidays, EXCLUDING health insurance and vacation/sick leave
$g per hour max rate without benefits
Each rate is a little higher than the previous one, but I'm not good at doing progressions in my head so I was making a spreadsheet to see if I could figure it out. Just as the numbers were not making sense at all, my World Time clock chimed 1 am again, which meant I must really not be that tired (my usual latest bedtime is 1:30 am).
World Time version 6 is in permanent beta test mode, and it has an amusing bug. It shows a series of clocks which I've set for all the US time zones, plus several around the world in Places of Interest to me. At the chime, all the clocks except the one for local time made the change correctly, but San Jose time remained at 2 am and counting. I re-synced the clocks to the NIST signal, but that didn't fix it. Finally closed and re-launched the program and it worked. But it changed the format of the last clock in my list from the simple hh:mm am/pm to the full date followed by the hh:mm:ss am/pm repeated twice. Too bad they are no longer fixing bugs - it's a great program for the most part.
But I digress.
To add to the confusion, Minerva is paying me 15% more than the MS highest rate, so it comes down to how much fully paid benefits are worth to me.
If my calculations are right, over the course of a year I would make more $ by choosing $c, if I didn't have to call in sick. But I'll do them all over tomorrow.