Work, glorious work
I apologise for the extreme lack of blogging recently, but I have been having a hellish sort of week. Workwise I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had any scope to do anything other than, well, work(!) during work hours, and have even had to bring home several hours work a couple of evenings. Bizarrely, this is supposed to be our quietest time of the year, and yet I am ten times more stressed out and under pressure than I was during January and February, which are allegedly our busiest times 
What it all boils down to is pension schemes. In order to audit pension schemes, you have to be specially trained, and all of the specially trained people, with the notable exception of me, have either left the firm or are currently at college doing exams. Combine this with the fact that there is an annoying piece of government legislation, which requires that all pension scheme accounts be signed and filed within seven months of the year end, and add into the mixture the fact that the overwhelming majority of pension schemes choose 5 April as their year end to coincide with the tax year. The net result is that the reporting deadline is the week after next, and suddenly there are in excess of twenty half-finished pension scheme audits which have my name on them
The manager for whom I am working this week is an individual who I dislike intensely. Were I not so busy working, I would be running a sweepstake on how many times she can email me from three metres away during any given 8.5 hour period. She has done nothing but throw crap at me all week, and then when I actually do what she tells me, she proceeds to undermine me. I was absolutely livid this morning, because in between pension scheme audits she had asked me to plan the audit I am in-charging for her next week. Planning an audit is a substantial task – normally two days work – so I’ve kind of been struggling to fit it into my spare time. One of the key tasks which needs to be completed is determining the financial statement materiality. Essentially, the way audits work is that we don’t issue a report saying that the financial statements are correct – that would be a physically impossibility and leave us open to being sued for an awful lot of money – so instead we issue a report which says that the financial statements are not materially misstated. It follows then, that before you can do anything much else, you need to determine a figure above which you will determine an error to be ‘material’. Unfortunately you can’t just pick this figure out of thin air; there are accepted methods for calculating it, and you have to document and justify every step you take so that it will stand up in a court of law.
Now for this particular client that I am auditing, we had come to a decision with the partner that materiality was going to be set at 1% of turnover, which is a fairly reasonable sort of figure. It does, however, demand that you know what turnover for the year is going to be… which we didn’t, because the client hadn’t sent us through any draft accounts. The manager therefore emailed the client, copying me in, and requesting he send us some figures immediately. This was on Monday evening, and she followed it up ten minutes later by sending me (sitting opposite her) an email informing me it was too late to ring the client now, but I needed to do it before 11am on Tuesday to ensure we got the information we required. So, at ten o clock on Tuesday I phoned the client, had a nice little chat, and ten minutes later was emailed a copy of the figures. I went to share this good news with the manager, and she effectively told me to pipe down because she was busy. Fine. I set materiality at £68k, finished the rest of the planning that evening at home, and the next day emailed her to say the work was complete and back on the network ready for review. Imagine my surprise then when I get to work this morning to find she has sent an abusive email to the very same client, demanding to know why he hasn’t sent us any numbers. If she had read what I had written or even glanced at the work she had asked me to do in my free time because it was so ‘urgent’ she would have instantly seen that not only had he provided the numbers, but I’d produced two spreadsheets of ratios analysing them. But she was too flipping lazy to do it, with the result that now the client (who I have to spend the next week with and desperately need to be in a cooperative frame of mind) is highly pissed off by our lack of professionality, and this is all *my* fault because my communication skills are inadequate. Right.
It just kind of makes you wonder what the point of trying is I am annoyed to be working on this client in general, because it is one of the three clients which I estimate that my office has, whose premises are entirely inaccessible by public transport. Given that I am the only person in the office who is entirely dependent on public transport, I seem a slightly illogical choice to lead the audit at best. I did actually question the manager on this point earlier in the week, seeing as a colleague of mine who is at the same level as me and possesses a perfectly functional car has nothing on next week. I went as far as to suggest it might be more convenient if he were to do the work instead, and I could carry on with the pension schemes. But oh no, he’s a guy and the entity which I am going to audit is a charity. For reasons which are utterly beyond me, there is an unspoken rule that guys don’t audit charities or pension schemes, as if it would somehow be demeaning for them to lower themselves to such things. And besides, I am apparently the designated charities expert 
Erm, yeah, I’ve worked on two charity audits before, and everybody else who has ever audited a charity has now left, so yippee – at last I have a claim to fame. I expressed the desire that if I was supposed to be an expert on charity auditing – which is rather different to normal auditing – that I might be allowed to go on some sort of charity auditing training, which might serve to ensure that I had a slight idea what I was supposed to be doing. I was told that no, they’d never sent anyone on that sort of training before, and if I got stuck I ought to read the website of the Charities Commission.
So, I have been reading the website of the Charities Commission on my journeys to and from work, and I have even downloaded a copy of the SORP for if I get bored of Babel at the weekend 
I must say that I am not terribly impressed by the Charities Commission website as a whole, and am struggling to find the information I require. Locating the SORP was fairly easy, but when I downloaded it there was a note informing me that it had been updated in July 2008. I am sure this note was designed to be helpful, but for those not intimately acquainted with the SORP, it’s more of a worry than anything else, because there’s no further detail as to what has been updated and why. Short of trying to obtain an out-dated version and comparing all 130 odd pages until I find a difference, I am at a loss to know how I shall ever be any the wiser
Sigh. The good news about next week is that I think I have convinced my assistant to give me a lift. That is to say, I rang her last week and asked her if she would, and she said yes, but it was all rather embarrassing because I’ve never actually met her before. And at the point at which she actually agreed, she was in the middle of a fire alarm drill at college with the result that there was a lot of background noise, so I guess I better call her tomorrow and check that it’s still all okay.
Tomorrow is going to be a horrible day and I’ve got no idea how I’m going to get through even a fraction of the stuff I need to. My main problem is that I’m trying to finalise the accounts of a pension scheme where the administrators are unable to tell me a) how many pensioners are in the scheme or b) how much pension they are paying them. If it wasn’t me who was responsible for sorting it out, that would be amusing 
To top it all off nicely, it is the Wrong Time of the Month, and it seems to be a particularly bad Wrong Time of the Month this time around. From Saturday onwards I’ve been having a bad case of PMT which has made me prone to burst into tears if anyone so much as says ‘boo’ to me. Saturday it was a message from Babel which set me off, Sunday it was an altercation with my mother, Monday it was a text message which came so out of the blue I had to spend half an hour in the toilets at work trying to calm down… From Tuesday onwards I began to feel emotionally a little more stable, but physically totally rubbish, although I have formed the hypothesis that a certain amount of low-level pain increases productivity. Seriously, right, all week I’ve been having random lower back pain which has been uncomfortable, though obviously not agonising, and much in the same way which the discomfort of kneeling on a cold floor concentrates the mind on prayer, I think being in a small amount of pain helps to concentrate the mind on work, or whatever task is in hand. Somehow it makes me more focussed, and less inclined to waste energy checking my emails
Once pain gets to a certain level, unfortunately, it then becomes harmful to productivity because you can’t actually sit still long enough to write a sentence. This is where I would like to sing the praises of Nurofen Plus with extra caffeine, which I finally succumbed to taking two tablets of this morning when it all got too much. Within half an hour, the pain was back down to a manageable level and I was able to sit back down at my desk I would particularly recommend it to anyone who is trying to lose weight, because if your stomach is anything like mine, fifteen minutes after taking it you will start to feel so sick that you won’t want to eat anything for the next 24 hours. If you’re not trying to lose weight and actually quite fancy a spot of lunch, this is rather a down side, so ultimately I guess it comes down to a personal choice as to whether you prefer feeling sick to being in pain. Personally I prefer feeling sick, in so far as it is possible to prefer such a thing, but it isn’t a painkiller I take on a regular basis because I always have the vague impression that it’s the sort of thing which might cause ulcers if overused, and having a friend who has an ulcer, I know that it’s not pleasant Although – and I’m sure this isn’t just my imagination playing tricks on me – didn’t Feeder once sing a song about Nurofen Plus?! I’m sure they did, but I can’t remember what it was called
Can I find anything else to moan about? In between bouts of feeling sorry for myself, I have been failing to sleep because I am so worried about Babel, who I care about so much and is working much harder than he ought to :cry: I tried to have Stern Words with him about it earlier in the week, but I don’t think that it probably succeeded terribly well, so today I went on an expedition to buy him some Ritter Sport to make amends. There appears to be one supermarket in Birmingham who stocks this most delightful of all chocolate, and it is just about a walkable distance from my office. That is to say, 25 minutes away which obviously isn’t far, but when lunch is only an hour and you have to get there and back, it’s only just about doable… and I was on a mission to get back from lunch before the hated manager (who had gone to the pub) realised that I’d nipped out. I went out to buy a bottle of water earlier in the week, and she asked me what I thought I was doing
This supermarket is located in the Well Dodgy part of town, and if you have more time there than I did, you can play a fun game where you try to track down someone else in the building who is speaking English. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to enjoy such cultural highlights, because I was trying to both buy a bar of chocolate and replenish my stock of toiletries. Oh yes, this is another rant of the week! I have a certain drawer in my bedroom where I keep a stock of certain hygiene products. Now, these items are mine. That is to say, I have bought them myself, with my own money – they have not been bought as part of the general shopping out of the general household budget. If someone finds that they have run out of such items and they desperately need them, I am more than happy for them to borrow from my drawer, and in fact it’s the only drawer in my room which I wouldn’t question anybody opening. But what I do not expect, is to open the drawer one evening and to find that persons unknown have spirited away the entire contents of the drawer for their own personal use. If you borrow something, you should replace it. If you can’t replace it, you should at least inform me so that I can replace it myself. Clearly, I am only going to open the drawer when I need something which is in there. If, being in that position, I open it and find it is unexpectedly empty, clearly I am going to be highly pissed off. It cost me £5 at the supermarket this lunchtime to repurchase the items I should have had in stock, and I am singularly unimpressed by what I regard as an inexcusable lack of courtesy
Oh dear, I really am grumpy tonight 
Nah, the upside was that at least Babel’s chocolate was in stock, although finding it was in itself a little problematic and involved me getting lost in the vegetable display. It’s a rather large supermarket, and I wasn’t sure where they kept the chocolate…
I’m sure I must have some good news! I got paid this week, which was nice. I still feel faintly surprised every time I get paid But the down side was that they took £50 more tax off me this month than last and I don’t think I stand much chance of ever working on why, because my payslip is so complicated these days. There’s some sort of complicated tax calculation relating to what I have to pay for the privelege of having life insurance, private healthcare benefit and the like, and understanding it is beyond me.
What else? I have volunteered to teach Esperanto to people in Africa via email. I’m not sure this is good news, I only really volunteered so that Babel wouldn’t feel obliged to. So far I’ve been contacted by a guy from Ghana and have managed to obtain the necessary copies of the EAB postal course to send him, but I feel a little embarrassed about the whole business. My Esperanto really isn’t good enough to be teaching other people
Other than that, not much to report. Babel and I are off to Esperanto House for the weekend, so hopefully that will be a nice opportunity to relax and not feel so stressed, and next week I should have something nice to blog about
Tags: accountancy, stress, Work