A slight case of overblogging

I'm one of the lucky ones. My paperwork has just come through, including the diagrams showing roughly how the new grades match to the old grades. I've been mapped directly across from my old point partway up the COIII scale to the equivalent point partway up new grade 7. This gives me a slight payrise (the scheme was intended to be about 1.5% on average), which if you backdate it to January and take tax off will pay for my new bike and leave a bit over to go out to dinner and celebrate on, and is just in time to be paid in this month's pay packet on Thursday. And in September we'll be getting the normal annual cost-of-living increase, I think that's going to be 3%. That's normally in August so will be backdated by one month too. I'm not even going to do the maths, I'll just wait and see. Being partway up the grade means plenty of space for progression anyway, my colleague John as a COII is also mapped directly across to grade 7, but right at the top of it.

I know other people are still waiting, so *fingers crossed* they're not one of the unlucky ones whose new grade is lower than their old one. There's a guarantee to keep paying them at the current rate for four years, but there go four years of expected increases, and what if you're still "overpaid" at the end of that, do you take a cut at that point? Hopefully there won't be too many of them. But the marking scheme did make it hard for anyone who isn't managing people to come out much higher, so it's a bit worrying for more senior computing staff.