Apart from the excitement which is Babel’s birthday, I am in general feeling rather low at the moment. Work has been more than usually depressing over the past week or so, and it’s getting to me so much that this morning I was contemplating calling in sick one day this week, just because I feel I need some time out before I snap. Whilst I may moan about work-related matters a lot, the 12 months have been an awful lot better than the preceding two years because of the amount of responsibility I now have. Yes, it can be a right pain being in-charge of the onsite fieldwork, and it means extra hours and extra pressure, but there are also a whole load of benefits. You get treated like an adult by both the manager and the client, you actually feel like you understand the client and their business, you also understand what it is you’re supposed to be doing and what needs to be achieved in which timeframe. Last week, however, I went back to being an assistant on what must be the world’s worst planned audit, and it’s seriously doing my head in

The girl who is in-charge is no older than me, but has more experience because she skipped uni and went straight into accounting. She’s one of these people who actually loves her job, but she’s new to the firm so she’s still a bit unclear as to how we do things. There were six of us out onsite last week, which meant the team had to spread out across two rooms, and I ended up sitting in the room she wasn’t in. It didn’t immediately occurred to me that this might be a problem, but it soon transpired that communication is not her strong point, and she made no effort to explain anything to me at all. I spent most of last Monday sittign staring at my screen, hoping it was magically going to tell me what I needed to do. Tuesday I gave up and point blank told her I didn’t have a clue and could she maybe give me some direction. She was quite rude, although it later transpired she didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing either, never mind what I was supposed to be doing, and whilst she made a few vague comments, essentially said nothing of substantial use. By Wednesday I decided to ignore her completely, and have since been directing all my queries to another girl who is the same level as me but worked on the client last year so has more idea than most of us what’s going on. She’s nice, so I have now made some progress but nowhere near as much as I should have done and it’s just got to the stage where I feel like it’s never going to be finished, I don’t even care if it’s never going to be finished, I just want to leave…

My best friend from work is leaving on Friday, and I’m jealous. I’ve totally had enough of this place now, and am glad I’m going away for new year so that I can have some time out to think things through. I think what’s actually depressed me is less the technicalities of this one particular audit, but more the conversations I’ve been having with one of the new trainees who’s just started this year. She’s finding it all really stressful, to the point where she’s started losing her hair, and has asked whether it gets any better, whether it’s worth all the struggle once you finally qualify. It’s so difficult to know what to say to her. I think if she’s already unhappy at this stage, accountancy really isn’t the career for her any more than it is for me. But I don’t want to make her feel worse by saying that this job not only destroys your life, it destroys your will to live and it destroys your soul.

Seriously though, it does. If I look back over the last 12 months, as one is inclined to do at this time of year, I can’t say that I’ve achieved anything at all. Whatever my objectives were – learning French is the only one I remember – I’ve made absolutely no progress with them. I feel like I’ve survived the year rather than lived it, just got through audit after audit after audit without too many misadventures but nevertheless without doing anything terribly well. And in the short gaps between bouts of auditing, I’ve been too tired and too unhappy to do anything productive and useful with my time. It’s got to the point where often I don’t even have the motivation to read, I just find myself sitting and staring at a page and realising I’ve been like that for ten minutes without absorbing a word. If I subtract the times I’ve spent with Babel, there are very few points at which I can remember being happy.

Not that I’m trying to indulge in self-pity, tis just a statement of fact. The solution, of course, is to do something about it and move on, which is what I’m trying to be proactive about at the moment. We shall see I had a good hormone-induced cry about life last night, and I felt slightly less desperate when I woke up this morning, so I’m going to try to make it through the rest of the week and then hope that over Christmas I’ll have chance to relax and come back with the strength to face another Busy Season.

Incidentally I have no right to be depressed at all, because I spent the weekend in Germany, but that was so cool I think it deserves a blog post of it’s own

Tags: accountancy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Random rambling. 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.