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.

After my annual appraisal, I decided to be brave and approached her at the end of the day to give her an update on my progress. I was ever so polite, apologised for interrupting her and said I just wanted to tell her where I was up to as I was going to be out of the office for three weeks now. How did she respond?!

Can’t you see I’m busy at the moment? Go away and come back later.

I’m fairly used to receiving one-line emails from this woman. “Have you finished the X Pension Scheme accounts? eom”. “Can you call Mr Y and Z&Co about the investment letter eom”, “I can’t find the XYZ file on my desk – can you go and look for it in the tax department” – those are a handful of the 26 emails she sent me last week. Bear in mind that I wasn’t working for her last week, I was working for an entirely different manager, and I was only helping her out to be polite.

Anyhow, a few weeks ago I compiled a set of accounts for one of her clients. Two days later she texts me during my evening and asks if they’re finished. When I text back to say they are, she tells me to mail them to the client tomorrow. I point out that she might like to review them before I send them to the client, in case I’ve made any mistakes. She obviously can’t be arsed to review them, and tells me to send them unchecked. Okay, well that’s against Firm policy, but whatever. I send them to the client, but both he and I are about to go on holiday so nothing happens about it until yesterday, when he calls me with an adjustment he’d like putting through.

Now this adjustment relates to a debtor for unpaid share capital which I’ve put in his balance sheet. I know nothing about it at all, but it was a debtor in his balance sheet last year, and having compiled the financial statements directly from his bank statements myself, I’m perfectly certain that it hasn’t been paid during the last twelve months. It turns out, however, that the debt was actually paid in March 2005, and showing it as a debtor in last year’s financial statements was utterly wrong. Oh dear. Luckily those accounts were nothing to do with me…

The point is, now we know that it’s wrong, it needs to be corrected, but I’m not entirely sure how. I could credit the debtor and make a random debit to this year’s profit and loss account, but I’m not entirely sure what to call it. Does this qualify as a prior year adjustment under UK GAAP, and if so do I actually need to go back and restate the prior year figures instead? If I do that, I need to insert a prior year adjustment note in the accounting policies, but the wording of that is not something I can compose on my own. In other words, I need the advice of the manager on how to proceed. It isn’t my role to take that kind of decision.

The manager wasn’t in the office on Monday, so I tried calling her. She didn’t pick up, so I emailed her the query. Two hours later I received the following.

I’m too busy to deal with this at the moment. Tell the client he’ll have to wait.

And when I say I received that, I mean it was the whole email. There was no “Hi Clare” at the start or “regards” at the end. Just two sentences requesting that I tell a client whose accounts she had got wrong that she was too busy to sort it out for him. Right.

I was a little annoyed about it because the client is a really nice guy, but the email I received from this woman this morning takes the biscuit.

I’ve been trying to chase an insurance company for nearly two months now to obtain a valuation of some policies one of our schemes holds with them. Every time they send me a valuation I end up with a totally different figure, and it’s all very frustrating. It’s an incredibly difficult company to deal with, because their policy means they won’t give you a name or a direct dial, and to speak to anyone at all, you have to answer a whole raft on security questions. Progress on resolving the query has thus been slow, and I feel like I’m hitting my head against a brick wall every time I speak to them.

So. The manager has been emailing me a couple of times a week to ask how it’s going, and I’ve been giving her an update report. Generally the emails are pretty terse, but I was fairly stunned by the one I got this morning. It was a blank message with the subject line:

Pension Scheme Name??

Not: “Hi Clare, how are you getting on with chasing that info for Pension Scheme Name”.

It’s just so, soooooo rude. It takes so little time to be civil in an email, but she just can’t be bothered. It frustrates me almost to tears that I get into trouble for having poor communication, and yet she behaves like this and no one blinks an eye lid