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 (more…)

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 (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…)