Lacking that Friday feeling
I am officially being rubbish at blogging again 
This was supposed to be a quiet week in which I was going to have time to do things other than audit, but it turns out that it isn’t. The only thing which is worse than going to work is going to work when you feel ill, which is what I had to do yesterday, when I developed a really strange headache and felt constantly sick. Damon helpfully suggested that I might be pregnant (thanks Damon 
), which leads me on to blogging about the Pope. The poor old Pope appears to have been getting quite a bit of stick in the media this week because of the fact that he won’t support condoms as a way of halting the spread of HIV in Africa. This vaguely annoys me, because the press seem to be missing one very salient point. He’s the *Pope* for goodness sake! He can’t advocate the use of condoms, it would be complete career suicide
In other news, I went all the way to Sheffield on Monday for no reason. That is to say, I went to attend an afternoon course with the very exciting title ‘Updates in Pension Scheme Auditing’. Sheffield is quite a long way away though, so I had to leave the office at 11 to arrive there by half one. I duly did so, only to discover that after all that effort, the theme of the course was auditing derivatives. I don’t entirely understand what a derivative is. I never wish to understand what a derivative is. What’s more, I am not being paid to understand what a derivative is. None of my office’s pension scheme clients have derivatives, and none of them are ever likely to. In fact the only office ever in danger of coming into contact with the things is the London office, who earn a lot more than I do to compensate for the inconvenience. Of course, I technically learnt about derivatives when I was at college. But given the choice between saying whether something is a put option or a call option, I can totally guarantee you that as with left v right and major v minor, I will choose the wrong one. In other words, it was a completely useless afternoon which had no applicability at all to my job and not at all worth spending so much time sitting on trains for Still, I guess that being paid to sit on trains is better than actually having to do some work.
Unfortunately, of course, I now have more work to do in the remaining four days of the week to make up for having a day off. And I have the least competent junior in the office assisting me. And the client refuses to use Microsoft Excel, prefering to handwrite all his schedules in pencil on A3 paper instead. I’m a little stressed and depressed.
Today is Friday, which is actually the worst day of the week if you’re an auditor. Monday is a slightly stressful day, because you generally don’t know where you’re going or what you might find when you get there, but nevertheless Monday is a day of hope, because things might actually turn out better than you expect. Most of Monday is spent trying to work out what the hell is going on, and any work you get done is a total bonus. Tuesday is probably the best day, because whilst you probably haven’t achieved anything substantial yet, you’re still full of realistic expectation that Wednesday is going to be the most productive day you’ve ever had in your life and there’s still plenty of time to ensure your audit is finished on schedule and no one works any overtime. Thursday can be a slightly unnerving day, as you realise that whilst Wednesday was a good day, you’ve got over half the work left to do and less than half of the time. Thursday afternoon degenerates into a wobbly panic, and in order to stop yourself crying you waste half an hour writing a list of all the undone tasks, allocating them to a member of the team and deciding how much time you think they should take. Invariably you end up with over half the tasks allocated to yourself and realise that as ever, Thursday night is Overtime Night. After a couple of hours work on thursday evening, in which you actually get more done than you have all week because you don’t have an assistant distracting you, the position looks a little better, but Friday is still set to be a horrible day as you fight against the clock to obtain as much information as possible from the client before you leave site. Generally, everything turns out to be okay in the end and most things get finished to some standard or other, but there’s always those nasty moments where you think they won’t, and by the time it actually gets to Friday evening, you feel so exhausted that all you actually want to do is sleep.
So yeah, I hate Fridays! This is one job where you definitely do *not* get that Friday feeling
Tags: auditing, friday feeling