The reason that there have been no posts on my blog of late is that I am spending a fortnight working in the place which fast feels like it is becoming my second home; Wantage. Wantage, if you are fortunate enough never to have heard of it, is a small town somewhere in the hidden depths of Oxfordshire. Imagine the back of beyond, go beyond it, and Wantage is about thirty miles away. One of our major clients has a large plant there; they use materials which are rather exciting and dangerous, and so they have to locate themselves in towns which no one will mind if they accidentally wipe out with an industrial spillage.

How many weeks of my life I have spent in Wantage I am not sure, except that it is far too many. The town itself is inoffensive enough, although there isn’t anything in it apart from an overpriced Waitrose, and the only hotel is rather a dive. The client is another story; a sprawling industrial site with a horrendously complicated accounting system, and a reporting deadline to the US timed to make every auditors’ life a misery. I was on the audit here last year, and we worked such crazy hours that in less than two weeks I managed to rack up over three days off in terms of overtime. The result was that the job went so horribly over budget that we only made a 30% recovery of our costs, and so this year the plan is to work crazy hours and not claim any overtime. To a manager, who is not working the aforementioned crazy hours, this evidently seems like a good idea

The hotel we’re staying in this time around is a big improvement on our previous choice and I’ve not had any strange men try to break into my room. In fact, this week my room is absolutely massive, with a double bed as well as a single, so it’s taking me half an hour each night to try to decide where to sleep. In the end I’ve had to let Duck choose

The only downsides to the establishment is that it is located nearly ten miles from the client, so we have to be up by half six to start work at eight, and the menu in the bar is a bit restrictive. Well, there are about three things on it which I can face eating, so I’m not so much working my way through it as proving the proposition that there are only six permutations of three. The thing which is nearly killing me, however, is the fact that there is absolutely no T Mobile signal in the entire building, and hence I cannot use my internet phone. In fact, I can only get one bar of a signal on my other O2 phone which I use for calls, and that only sometimes when I stand by the window, and so even checking my email on that can be problematic. Added to which there is no internet access available to us during the day at the client, and the most excitement I got last week was checking my work email every other day. Tonight, however, I have done something illegal and somehow managed to connect myself to one bar of a random unsecured wireless network which seems to be floating around on this side of the hotel. So far, so good

There are so many Wantage stories I could tell that I don’t know where to start…

Perhaps with James in Shipping, for whom I have a passionate and happily reciprocated hatred. I guess you guys probably don’t want to hear the ins and outs of revenue recognition, but the idea is that a company can only record a sale in its accounts if it has actually sold something. That sounds fairly simple, but suppose you are trying to calculate the sales figure at 31/12/07 and at that date you had £1m worth of widgets sitting on a ship on the way to an important customer in China. International standards dictate that you are only deemed to have made a sale when the risks and rewards of ownership have passed from you the seller to your customer. When does this happen; is it when the goods leave your premises, or is it when the goods arrive at the premises of your customer. To whom do they technically belong whilst they are spending Christmas Day floating in the middle of the ocean?!

The way our client works it is that a sale can not be included in the figures until the goods have been fully delivered, and one of my jobs in the audit is to identify some goods which look like they might have been in transit at the year end and figure out whether they had been delivered or not. In order to do this, I require what we call a POD (proof of delivery, nothing to do with the Poddington Peas, although now you remind me of them, they were rather cool ). A POD is basically a Chinese person signing and dating a piece of paper saying “I have received these goods” which is then scanned into a computer by the haulage firm and a copy sent to the vendor to prove the lorry driver didn’t misappropriate the widgets en route. I mean, let’s face it, you could have a lot of fun with stolen widgets.

Okay, so all I want to do is see some of these things. Maybe about twenty. So last year I went to see the man called James who works in the Shipping Department, and therefore whose entire job is to keep on top of these delivery signatures. I explained what I wanted and submitted him a list in my bestest handwriting, accompanied with a sweet eyelash-fluttering smile… and he told me to fuck off.

Seriously, he did. The relationship kind of deteriorated from that point onwards. He point blank refused to help me, I said he had to, he asked what would happen if he didn’t. I said our firm would have to issue a qualified audit report, he said he didn’t give a shit, I said his boss might think differently, we reached a stalemate. In the end my boss had to speak to his boss and we reached a sort of compromise where he provided me with a fraction of what I had asked for, and my manager invented the details of the rest. Not that a reputable audit firm would ever do such a thing, of course…

So, when it was time for me to start auditing the revenue recognition adjustment last Wednesday, you can understand that I was totally thrilled. Hmmm. Mustering all the courage I possessed I set off on a hike across the site to the building where Shipping is located, and timidly knocked on the door. I decided to let bygones be bygones and tried to start from scratch with the line “Hello, I don’t know if you remember me from last year, but…”. He interrupted me: “Yeah I remember you, you were the auditor who gave me a pile of shit to do”. There was just something in his sneering face which seriously annoyed me, so I said “Yep that’s right. I’ve got some more shit for you to do this year. Here’s the list” and walked off. Over the past few days when my superior has been asking me how revenue recognition has been going, I’ve had to try to evade the issue. Today, however, it could be dodged no longer and the partner explicating asked me to trek over to Shipping and see how he was getting on.

Amazingly, and without meeting the man you can’t appreciate how amazing this is, he had printed off around half of the documents I had requested him to provide. And when I thanked him for them and politely enquired when I could expect to receive the other half, the worst he did was murmur “fucking auditors are never happy” under his breath as I walked away. All in all I feel I got off lightly

Oh dear, and now I’ve got so excited talking about revenue recognition I don’t have time to explain how I got trapped in the finance department by a flock of geese, or how I accidentally managed to spill a cup of coffee down the wall of the Research Director, or how it took us an hour to travel the distance to the hotel last night because I directed us out the entrance of a car park and through Wantage’s one-way system in the direction you’re not supposed to go. Plus my memory stick has died (The Lord have mercy on its soul) and I’m worried I may die a slow and painful death during the night, because I’ve spent the day drinking coffee with random spoons of white powder added to it. It was just sitting in the middle of the table, and someone told me it was chemical milk for putting in the coffee so I did, but it occurred to me afterwards that when I was sitting in a chemical plant in the middle of a corridor of laboratories, ingesting random white powders one finds lying about may not be what one describes as a Good Idea.

Oh and I’ve been to Esperanto House for the weekend. And my rather gorgeous boyfriend and I have officially been together for a year now, and I’m trying to type this whilst listening to Michel Thomas speak French in a really annoying voice and reading a book about astronomy with my spare eye, because life is really too short not to multitask. Await more posts once I have returned to the metropolis of international culture and civilisation which is Birmingham!

Tags: hotels, Wantage, Work

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.