People who are shockingly rude in work emails.

I’m not talking about insults. Rather, people who through either personality defects or sheer laziness insist on firing off a dozen one-line emails to you every day, despite the fact you are actually sitting in the same room.

There is one manager in my office who completely lacks communication skills of any sort. Unfortunately I end up working for her on pension scheme audits reasonably often, and instead of coming to speak to me and tell me what she would like me to do, she emails me with instructions, regardless of the fact that I may even be sitting next to her at the time. This creates a problem for me, because I have been told off in my appraisal for communicating with managers via email, but I feel I have to cover my own back by responding in an email also. If I don’t, I leave myself in a dangerous situation where she has a written record that she asked me to do something and I have no written record of the fact that I told her I’d done it, or hadn’t done it because there was some sort of problem. (more…)

Now I know we all make typos, but I’ve been in a situation today which has really hacked me off. My job has been made unnecessarily difficult because two employees of an international bank couldn’t be bothered to spell check their correspondence before they sent it off.

As part of the audit of a pension scheme, we have to comment on the internal governance and control of the investment managers who hold the scheme’s assets. Normally this is just a formality. These banks and institutions have a report published every year in which a large firm of accountants will certify that everything is hunky-dory. We obtain a copy, review it, and put a note on the file to say it’s all cool.

The only complication is that these reports take a long time to produce. So, in this instance, an investment manager has sent me a report saying their controls were fine up to 31 December 2006. Because I’m auditing the period from 6 April 2007 to 5 April 2008 this isn’t good enough, but no matter – I simply emailed them to ask for confirmation that there had been no changes in control since the date on the report. This is normally a simple, five minute procedure. They are supposed to rely in writing that nothing has changed, I print the email and stick it on the file, we all forget about it.

See below the response I received: (more…)

A friend and I were having a chat this morning and I’m thinking of starting a Facebook group for auditors. See below!

You know you’re an auditor when…

You can’t leave home without a hole-punch and a week’s supply of staples… even if you’re just going to the supermarket.

You make jokes about how boring it must be to be an actuary, but secretly you just wish you were earning that much money and would like to date one.

You have stayed in Premier Inns and Travelodges the length and breadth of the country… and you can talk for hours about their relative merits.

Your favourite words in the whole wide world are “no further work proposed”. (more…)

Today I am going to improve your minds Nah, this is prompted by a discussion with a colleague yesterday, during the course of which I was utterly shocked to discover that he was ignorant of what I consider to be a basic and fundamental fact in accounting and mathematics. I expressed my disgust with the intellect of the youth of today to my mother last night, and was equally shocked and horrified that she had no idea what I was talking about either. (more…)

Today was our annual departmental “Away Day”. We have one of these experiences, which are supposed to foster team building, approximately once every six months. Last year we went to Wolverhampton Race Course, which on reflection was terribly civilised good fun. This year, HR were obviously feeling meaner, and had arranged for us to take part in a version of the “It’s A Knockout” competition, as formerly shown on tv in a decade before most of us were born (more…)

Tonight I went out for a sort of reunion with some of the people I work with. It may seem a bit strange to have a reunion with people who still work in the same office as you, but the nature of our job is that we spend precious little time in our office at all, and therefore see each other rather infrequently. There were seven of us who started together three years ago this coming September as accountancy trainees. Two have bitten the dust along the way; one girl disappearing in mysterious circumstances, and another guy being sacked for total incompetence. The five of us who remain have seen each other less and less often as time has gone by, and seeing as we’re now all on the verge of qualifying and becoming fully fledged ACAs, now seemed like a good time to get together and catch up on our future plans. (more…)

I feel so much better today Last week my best friend at work was on holiday, and whilst I knew she was still in the UK, I was nevertheless trying not to contact her and interrupt her week off. Restraint isn’t my strongest virtue, but I managed to content myself by sending her an email on Friday afternoon in which I vented my feelings about the entire business in as much depth as it is prudent to vent one’s feelings about senior management in work email Anyway, I got a text from her first thing this morning in which she said she’d just got my email… and she’d been graded as 2 too! (more…)

I’m tired, so rather than explain my appraisal in technicolour detail, I’m going to post the results of the form with a bit of explanatory commentary. It’s over now at least, and as I said to someone earlier, the benefit of always assuming the worst is that you are never unpleasantly surprised It could have been worse, but on the whole it was as I expected – no worse, no better! (more…)

Tomorrow is my annual appraisal, and so I am not a happy bunny Part of me is hoping it will be postponed again, though the other part of me would be glad to get it over and done with and find out if/when I will be getting a payrise. The word on the street is that the full payrise doesn’t come until September when we sign new contracts, but we have to go up at least £1k in theory because the new graduates starting in September 08 will be on £1k more than the graduates who started in September 07, and we always go up proportionally… (more…)

Today I have achieved something which I have been trying and failing to accomplish for the best part of three years now – figured out how to make my work computer access Yahoo mail! I am so excited that I felt the need to make a post to commemorate the occasion What I have done is, of course, a highly illegal manoevre, but I am taking comfort from the fact that I have only persevered so long in the belief that it was possible because one of my colleagues had figured out how to do it, and she has just been promoted to manager. (more…)