There’s always tomorrow!
As me and two suitcases collapsed onto a train out of Marylebone yesterday evening, I was unable to stop myself exclaiming out loud; “Today has been an absolute bloody disaster!”
The man whom I had just sat down next to gave me a funny look. “There’s always tomorrow,” he said. I was unsure whether he meant that in a consolatory way or not.
Okay, let’s be honest that this week’s audit has been running a little bit behind schedule. This is partly because I worked no overtime on Monday night (I was busy watching wrestling), no overtime on Tuesday night (I was busy getting drunk) and did precious little during the day on Wednesday (I was busy throwing up). I worked dead hard on Thursday though. I did a full day at the client obviously, then came back to my room and worked until gone eleven before getting up at six to do a couple of hours before the official start of the day. I was confident that with a hard day’s work at the client and a bit of tinkering on the train I would still be on track to hand in a completed audit file and fully drafted Key Issues Memorandum before eight pm on Friday evening.
The first couple of hours at the client went okay. We were slightly inconvenienced by the fact that their sole meeting room had been booked by a woman in a purple headscarf who was giving massages to the client staff, but hey, what else do you expect with a client in the media industry who’s just made a loss of £700k before tax?! And who are we to object if we are made to audit from the stationery cupboard on an unsteady circular table which has a nasty habit of swinging round on it’s stand whenever you touch it? It would have been churlish to complain that I had to stand up every time somebody needed a new pen in order to allow them access to a shelving unit and having sorted out some of the key audit issues instead of having breakfast, I still felt reasonably upbeat.
Things became a little complicated around eleven when I accidentally discovered that the premises in which the client is situated are not leased by them from a landlord, but rather leased by a different company who have just been sold out of the group and with whom there is no formal signed contract in place which allows my client to be present in the building at all. I was having an interesting debate with myself regarding substance over form and whether IAS17 required that this circumstance be disclosed as an operating lease commitment (actually to be honest I was wishing I hadn’t designated IAS17 as a standard to omit during my tactical revision process last Autumn), when suddenly everything went dark.
It really did go very dark, as my stationery cupboard not unreasonably had not been furnished with a window. Simultaneously, my laptop switched to battery power and my phone stopped charging. Hmmm. There appeared to have been a power cut 
I opened the door to the main office to let in some natural daylight and saw the client staff standing round in abject confusion. They continued to stand around in abject confusion for nearly an hour, after which point they debunked en masse to the pub leaving behind only me, my colleague and the management accountant. I was actually invited to the pub too, by a rather nice looking girl who wondered if we could book everybody’s drinks to my company’s expense budget, but I declined.
My colleague and I continued to work for the couple of hours which our laptop batteries allowed, and then I began to get concerned. I still had a tonne of points to clear with the client and being honest I hadnt really started writing my Key Issues Memorandum yet, but the client was hardly able to answer anything at all without access to her computer system, and there was no sign of the power coming back on. Someone had called the electricity board and it turned out there had been some sort of fatal failure in the system which meant an entire three streets had gone off. Oh dear 
Having already decided that there was nothing for it but to leave the client with a list of outstanding information required and pull off site, I phoned my supervisor to get permission, assuring her that I would be back to the office before the close of play to discuss things with her and finish writing everything up. I still wasn’t too concerned at this stage as I knew I could do a good hour’s work on the train and recharge my ailing laptop battery in the process. My supervisor agreed this was reasonable, so having talked things through with the client and thanked her for all her help during the week, I left the premises before three pm in a taxi bound for Euston.
Arriving at Euston I was expecting to see it somewhat calmer than it generally is on a Friday evening, by virtue of the extreme earliness of the hour. I was therefore somewhat surprised to find several hundred people (I do not exaggerate) milling around in front of the display boards. There was far too much background noise to hear any of the overhead announcements and so it was several minutes before I realised that the reason for all the hubbub was that every single train out of Euston appeared to have been cancelled. At roughly the same time the girl I was travelling with received a call from another colleague who had skived off work even earlier and who was apparently now stuck on a train outside Milton Keynes where there had been a severe signal failure. Never one to believe the electronic displays in railway stations (bitter past experience has taught me that they can be ridiculous behind the times in terms of the actual situation) I quickly checked out the real-time situation on my phone and was merrily informed by National Rail Enquiries that there would be no Birmingham bound trains out of Euston until Saturday. Shit! :cry:
To say I was upset would be to put in mildly, but luckily so many years of not being able to drive meant I have a good grasp of the train network and was quickly able to start brainstorming alternative methods of getting home. It came down to a choice between getting a train from Saint Pancras to Leicester and from there back to Brum, or going to Marylebone and travelling into Birmingham Snow Hill on the Chiltern Line. In the end I decided that much as I detest travelling on the Chiltern Line it was going to be marginally quicker than going via Leicester, plus my original ticket would be valid for travel whereas work might object to me trying to recharge a ticket home from Leicester. Soon we were in a taxi speeding swiftly down the road to Marylebone.
I apologise to anyone whose geography of London makes them question why the bloody hell I had to get a taxi between Euston and Marylebone when it is a perfectly pleasant twenty minute walk. The nineteen year old I was travelling with was wearing most unsuitable shoes and thought that walking from the Euston to Euston Square tube station constituted a hike, so I didn’t have much choice 
We arrived to find Marylebone in chaos as hundreds of irate commuters desperately sought a way out of the capital. A Birmingham train was due to depart at four so we ran onto the platform and along the whole length of the train only to find that it was completely rammed. Seriously, I have never seen a train that was so crowded in my entire life. Never mind seats, there wasn’t a single place to stand remaining and the people were all crammed in like sardines. We soon heard an announcement saying could everybody please get off platform two as no one else was going to be allowed onto the sixteen hundred hours departure to Birmingham for their own safety.
Too many train journeys backwards and forwards from High Wycombe happily gave me an advantage over most of the disgruntled commuters and I managed to coerce my colleague into getting onto a 16.03 service to Banbury. I might add that she was extremely reluctant to do this, having no idea where Banbury was and not believing me when I said it was en route, but I knew that once we got there we could catch a Virgin service coming up from Oxford and would be okay. This train was not quite as packed as the Birmingham one and we even managed to get a seat. I worked for my eleven frantic minutes of remaining laptop battery time and then proceeded to calculate an operating lease disclosure note on paper in a good old fashioned manner to pass the rest of the journey. We passed through High Wycombe with the gleeful knowledge that we didn’t have to get off there, and were actually quite excited when we suddenly realised we could see the manor where we have our courses looming on the horizon.
Banbury, when we arrived, was in a complete state of chaos with vast quantities of people trying to fight their way onto services to Birmingham and beyond. Our luck was in and we managed to squeeze onto the first service northwards. I did have to stand for the entire duration of the hour long journey but by this stage I was so glad to be getting out of London that I didn’t care and I had exhausted my aptitude for auditing without a computer.
So it was that finally at seven pm I rolled up to the office with my trolley case and bumped into a pile of colleagues who I charitably assumed to be working late but who actually turned out to be halfway through a bar crawl. The office was full of hoovering cleaners who were intensely irritated by my arrival, and my line manager who gave me a funny look and didn’t speak to me for half an hour as he sat busily typing.
I set to work on a hasty audit of deferred tax, then began writing up all the notes which the poor person who is going to have to pick up my work next week was going to need. I was about halfway through when my manager came to speak to me, asking if I had been in London. I explained my disaster of a day and that I was on holiday next week so had had to come in to sort some things out and ensure that no one had problems next week when following up on my work. As he was leaving he thanked me for coming in, which was rather nice because even if it turns out that all the work I’ve done is crap, at least it’s been noted that I am trying hard and do have a certain amount of motivation, which is what he had accused me of lacking a month or two ago. I am going to make a point of saying on my appraisal how much overtime I have worked over the past few weeks. If i claimed all of the hours which I have legit worked, I think I could easily have another whole week off but I’m not going to put in a claim in the interests of making a good impression. Plus, being honest, some of the overtime which I’ve worked wasn’t a result of the complexity of the job but of my own inexperience at being in charge and auditing areas like revenue recognition in the service industry, so what I will say on the appraisal is that if anything the time really ought to be booked to training.
Anyway, around half eight the security guard came and asked me to leave. I had pretty much done all i wanted to on this weeks audit and submitted my timesheet so I was happy to, but I still had review points I needed to clear on last week’s job. I started doing that some time after eleven pm last night and emailed my supervisor at one in the morning to inform her of my progress. I’m not sure she will be impressed with the said progress as much of what the client told me is utter crap, but hopefully the time of the email will be noted. I’ve also told her to call me next week if there is a problem, despite the fact I will be in Geneva, and I hope that that also will be noted as commitment to the job 
And now I’m exhausted and just want to sleep for a week! I’m going abroad though which is cool, and to a country where the trains actually function properly. Hooray!!!