Blogging appears to continue to be at best spasmodic, which I regret, but I still seem to be very busy with work, and in the spare time which I have had, I’ve been trying to do things other than surfing the internet, mainly learning to type and to speak some limited Czech. Surfing the internet is at any rate severely hindered by the fact that our wireless connection at home is nearly permanently down, and since I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress it’s become virtually impossible for me to log in and make a post from my phone

Learning to type is progressing rather well. Babel lent me his CDROM, and while the tone of the instructor is still upsetting me (there’s a little man who keeps popping up on screen and telling me to examine my hands because I look like I have ten thumbs!), I seem to be making quite good progress. I have learnt all the letters now and can type them with what I consider to be a reasonable level of accuracy, albeit nur at a rate of around 35 words per minute. The numbers and symbols are another matter entirely and I’m not getting on very well with those at all at the moment, but for the most part, if I want to type at high speed, it’s unlikely to be something which involves a lot of letters and numbers, so I’m not getting too hung up on those.

Czech is very difficult indeed, and some days I’m started to wonder if I’m sufficiently intelligent to learn it, but I think that’s more because I’ve felt a little depressed of late than the fact that I’ve encountered anything conceptually difficult. I haven’t actually encountered any grammatical ideas I can’t get my head around yet, but the sheer ‘foreignness’ of even the simplest words sometimes makes me wonder if I’m ever going to have the time and energy to master it. Even a basic words like dog, tea, room… seem to take an age to master because they bear no relation at all to any words I know from other languages. And just when you congratulate yourself on correctly mastering a new noun and the correct gender to go with it, you encounter a new case in which it unexpectedly changes it’s key vowel and adds an increasingly bizarre ending, rendering it utterly unrecognisable from the nominative form you thought you’d done so well to remember. I guess it’s always like this when you start learning a new language, until the magical day when it clicks

I have made some progress over the last few weeks at any rate, and I’ve set up some really cool spreadsheets to help me learn words. I’ve got one for nouns with a tab for each letter of the obscenely long Czech alphabet, and then I’ve got a funky colour-codin system going on which indicates gender at a glance. I’m quite proud of it And Windows Vista is actually growing on me, now I’ve had a chance to use it. It’s still a little bit cumbersome to insert accented characters into Microsoft Excel, but in Word it’s actually a piece of cake

I’m going to be away from home for most of the next month, and I’ve just been packing my Czech stuff in my bag because I’m hoping to have time to look at it in the evenings. I’ve also packed my highway code and a driving theory book which Babel bought for me a while ago, because once I get the next month behind me I am most definitely going to book a lesson.

Tomorrow morning I’m off to London at a horribly early hour, and will be working there for the next two weeks, excluding Easter. I’m actually rather scared about it, which is utterly irrational, but it seems late in life to start making a habit of being rational I did these same two audits this time last year, and I think the issue stems from the fact that last year they were terribly important to me. In February last year, I made an unforgivably bad judgement on an audit I was a part of, and essentially these two weeks in London had been given to me as my chance to prove to my line manager that I wasn’t a waste of space. I succeeded, and since then things have fortunately gone very dramatically uphill, but they were two such difficult and traumatic weeks that they’ve left a very deep impression on my subconscious.

Personally, I feel like I’ve learnt an awful lot about auditing over the course of the past year, and I feel like I’m a much more confident person. When I was facing these audits this time last year, I essentially didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing. That is to say, the clients operate in a service-based industry as opposed to a manufacturing-based one, and I had no prior experience of auditing that kind of company. Service-based businesses are obliged to recognise their revenue in line with a mysterious accounting standard called UITF40, and my main role in the audit was to ascertain whether they were complying with this correctly. I arrived, however, on day one, with absolutely no idea what UITF required let alone any idea how to test whether the companies were complying with it, and so there was rather a steep learning curve (and a stupid amount of overtime!) between that point and submitting adequately completed audit files to the manager!

These days, happily, I understand the gist of UITF 40 and I know what sort of evidence I need to obtain and how I need to set out my spreadsheets, and really, these audits should be pretty straightforward. There are a few complications of the nature that the client in week one hates my guts because last year I actually (correctly!) concluded that he *wasn’t* complying with UITF40 over one particular invoice and this upset him deeply. Also that I’m working with the world’s worst junior, who I don’t trust as far as I could throw him. And the fact that an inconvenient timing of the moon means that Easter falls in the middle of the audits and means I only have four days for each one.

These are problems which shouldn’t be insurmountable, so long as I work hard and am focussed. So why am I so stressed that my jaw has started clicking and locking? I don’t 100% know, but I think it’s some sort of fear that I’ll get there and it *won’t* be significantly easier than it was last year, and I’ll still be really stressed and short of time and having to work all the hours that God sends in order to get it even halfways done, with a last minute mad dash to write the client-facing report on the train home on the final day. I think it’s a fear of (for an inexplicable reason) not coping with something which I should be perfectly well able to cope with. I don’t know. I want to be able to go to London and think “Wow, I feel like I’ve advanced so much in the last 12 months” and instead I’m scared I’ll get there and thinK “Here I am 12 months on doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same place, and not doing it significantly better. What a waste of 12 months!”

Time will tell I guess. After two weeks I’m off to York, but it’s anybody’s guess what I’m actually supposed to be doing there. In between, Babel and I are going to the British Esperanto Congress in Salisbury which on the one hand should be really good, because I could majorly do with a holiday, and on the other hand appears to be becoming stressful in itself, because I made a list of all the things we needed to organise beforehand this morning and it seemed remarkably long.

This hasn’t been a very happy week because there was potentially bad news about Babel’s job midweek and absolutely no progress at all with respect to the university, but I guess those things aren’t really my business to talk about in public. I got very upset about it all the other day, which was partly because I am very depressed about it and partly because I was feeling hormonal. Babel and I are also thinking about starting to look at houses, which should be something positive to get excited about, but I kind of feel like my life is on hold until May when all this working away will be over, and it’s hard to concentrate on other things, so I’m not being as proactive in helping Babel look for things as I probably should be

Other than that, now news apart from the fact that I’ve read two very good books recently and will blog about them in due course if I have the time/energy/internet connection Babel and I went to Evesham yesterday, which was very pleasant and much nicer than the week before, when we’d ended up watching The Haunting in Connecticut by mistake. I categorically refuse to blog about that, because it was so disturbing that I’m still having nightmares :cry:

Tags: czech, typing, Work

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 3:49 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.