Waterloo
Babel wrote a book review on his website the other day, which made me start thinking about the Battle of Waterloo. The Battle of Waterloo for me is representative of the complete and utter failure of the British education system, because I managed to complete my entire schooling without ever having heard of it. Having later discovered that it was really rather important as battles go, I can only see this as a massive failure on the part of the person who designed the National Curriculum for history.
I first heard of the Battle of Waterloo in 1999, at which point I was 14 and reading Thackerey’s Vanity Fair.. If anyone hasn’t read that book, I would thoroughly recommend it. It’s so excessively large that I confess I’ve never managed to read it a second time, but especially if you aren’t a fan of Jane Austen I think you’ll find it rather refreshing; a 19th century novel where the heroine is very far from prim and proper. It’s also a book with an awful lot of action in it, so the 900 odd pages don’t really drag, and there is one very seminal chapter where two of the male characters participate in the battle of Waterloo. At the distance of nearly 11 years, the exact wording of the text eludes me, but if my memory serves me correctly there was an exciting description of the battle which finished with the words, “Of course, every Englishman knows the outcome of events on that fateful day”, or something loosely to that effect. Essentially, the chapter finished without clarifying which side won the battle, with the assumption that readers would already be aware of that fact. I wasn’t 
This was back when the internet was still almost an unknown quantity, and the height of technical sophistication was to possess a CDROM of Encarta 96. I duly went and looked up Waterloo in our home copy, and improved my education 
I thought no more about it until October 2004 when I was sitting in an introductory lecture about the history of mathematics. The lecture was being given by a very eccentric little man who was about to be sacked as the head of statistics in some sort of extraordinary departmental reorganisation which abolished the school of statistics entirely. He was the sort of lecturer who demanded audience participation, and requested that people raise their hands if they knew the date of certain historical events which he was going to name. After a few relatively easy propositions, he got to the Battle of Waterloo, and I raised my hand, confident that I knew this one. To my complete shock and horror, I was the only person (in a room of 200+) who did so. This was a highly traumatic experience for me, as my main aim in life was to get through my entire university career without ever speaking to a member of staff. Up until this point I had been thoroughly successful, never having spoken a word in a lecture ever, but my record was now spoiled, as the lecturer forced me to prove that I did indeed know the date 
Seeing as we now appear to be talking about the history of maths, it seems a good time to mention that there is an excellent series on BBC4 at the moment (Mondays, 9pm) narrated by the guy who wrote the book about prime numbers which Babel bought me for Christmas. The first episode this Monday just gone covered the Egyptians, Babylonians and Greeks and was very good indeed
In other, utterly unrelated news, two years ago today I went to Peterborough and was trapped on a sofa unable to move for in excess of an hour, during which time I had no choice but to watch the film SuperSize Me, on account of the fact that Tim had fallen asleep on top of me and, to put it kindly, he is unlikely to blow away in a sudden gust of wind 
I was so stressed that I ultimately resorted to reading Mark’s Gospel in Esperanto in a desperate attempt to calm my nerves. It wasn’t entirely what I had expected when I went to Peterborough that day, but the reason I had actually gone to Peterborough is unbloggable, so you will have to make do with that anecdote.
The most remarkable thing about the episode now is actually how incredibly long ago it seems. In some respects, this is a positive reflection because I can look back and realise how much less of a nervous wreck I am now than I was back then. In other respects, it is a negative reflection because at this point two years ago I hadn’t yet done some things which I wish very much I had never done. If I could lay my hands on a time machine, I would go back and stop myself from doing them, despite the fact that, paradoxically, that would result in my current life being much less happy than it is today.
I might also go back, actually, and watch the end of Supersize Me, because Babel woke up before the end and I never got to see the conclusion. I am, however, very glad that he did wake up… or, rather, very glad that a certain friend sent me a text message which vibrated in his ear and woke him up… and very grateful to him for what happened next.
If we now make a rather tenuous link from Big Macs to the USA in general, it suddenly seems relevant to talk about creationists, and the fact that I appear to be working with one. That is to say, within the last couple of weeks we have taken on about 12 new graduates at my firm as part of our annual training scheme. Someone I know just befriended one of them on Facebook, so I clicked on his page and was surprised to find “creationism” listed as one of his interests and his website a link to something about “intelligent design”. 
Given that his Facebook profile is seemingly public, it surprises me that HR didn’t review it before appointing him and come to the conclusion that his ability to believe in an opinion contrary to all known facts of the universe might not be a good qualification for a job which revolves around reaching judgements as to whether opinions are sufficiently supported by known facts. He is probably a very nice person, however, and if I were a member of our HR department I wouldn’t have given myself a job either.
Right now I rather wish I didn’t have a job, as I have just had yet another run-in with a Certain Manager. Next week our office is having the equivalent of an Ofsted inspection, if we were a school as opposed to a very well-respected office of accountants. Basically it involves a Higher Power requesting a sample of our audit files, and reviewing them to see if we have complied with International Standards on Auditing. ISAs, as we fondly call them, are published in a book which is of a similiar size to the Bible, just less racy. The Higher Power compiles a list of all the minor breaches of these standards we have committed, which then gets sent to other Higher Powers who probably ultimately fine us. I don’t honestly know a lot about it, but it seems to take place at least once a year, and all the managers get very stressed.
Luckily, the Higher Power notifies us of the files they want to review some time in advance and it just so happens that this year they wish to review a pension scheme which I audited last November. I am not personally worried about this – I know I didn’t do a shoddy job, because the partner pointed out to me at the time that the file was highly likely to be chosen for review in the future due to it being the biggest scheme audited by our office. Any criticisms they make are likely to be petty.
The manager, however, emailed me this morning (for visualisation purposes, I am sitting four metres away from her), and told me that I hadn’t filled out a certain form. When we get to the end of an audit and have a set of draft financial statements prepared, our last task is to review them. This is essentially proof-reading; we check that everything adds up and correct the managers’ apostrophe usage There is then a form we have to fill in which requires us to sign and date that we have checked 22 different points. These range from the slightly inane “check that the balance sheet balances” to the exceptionally tiresome “check every prior year figure to the previous year’s signed financial statements”. The form is then supposed to go on the front of the file, and one of the major things for which our office has been rapped over the knuckles in past investigations is that we haven’t done this.
Now, I was greatly surprised to find I hadn’t filled out such a form. I inspected our paper file, and sure enough it wasn’t there. I had quite blatently carried out the procedures, however, on no fewer than three different drafts of the financial statements, because there were three such versions on files, covered in detailed annotations and corrections. There was no way in my opinion I would have doen that without filling out the form, so I concluded that the manager had probably lost it.
As far as I was concerned, it was just one of those things, but the manager wasn’t happy and instructed me to forge three copies of the form, one for each date on the file. On the one hand, I knew I had done the work I was signing for. On the other hand, I really wasn’t happy about backdating my signature. I was especially not happy when I was requested to do it in different colour pens and make sure the paperwork looked sufficiently dog-eared as to be authentic. I expressed my unease about practising such a deception, and was essentially told to shut up and get on with it as it was all my fault in the first place.
I was tempted to go and speak to my line manager, but he’s had an allergic reaction to his flu jab, so in the end I went ahead and signed as requested. Hmmm. By pure coincidence, another piece of work I am performing resulted in me opening the prior year electronic file for the client in question later this morning. Inspecting the relevant section, guess what I found embedded?! An *electronic* version of the required form, signed and dated three times by myself!
I initially felt rather happy and vindicated that I had actually done my job properly. This was followed by a wave of complete horror. Had I not randomly opened that file this morning and noticed that embedded document, I would probably have lost my job. The (unalterable) dates on the electronic version did not correspond with the dates the manager had instructed me to sign on paper, meaning that it would be fairly evident to any self-respecting inspector that the paperwork was an attempt to mislead them. In such a circumstance, I cannot imagine for one minute that someone higher up would have taken the blame, and that could very well have been my own personal Waterloo.
I was considerably wound up by this. Partly wound up by myself, I guess, that I had yielded to pressure and allowed myself to be bullied into signing something I shouldn’t have done. Very annoyed with the manager too though, who shouldn’t have asked me to do such a thing in the first place. I went to update her as to the situation. As ever, she declared herself too busy to speak to me and suggested I put it in an email. I didn’t want to have that sort of conversation on record on an email, so in a fit of frustration I waited until she went to the toilet, stole the file from her desk, and destroyed the offending documentation…
Somewhat ironically, I have just received an email requesting me to complete an e-learning module on “professional ethics”. To me that pretty much seems an oxymoron, and I can only imagine it is going to test my understanding of how to operate a shredder
Tags: battle of waterloo