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…)

I remember quite a long time ago that someone I know posted a link to a quiz about sexuality in the JEB forums. At the time at which I took it, I was still at the stage when I wanted not only for everyone to think that I was straight, but also to be straight, and so it struck me that it might be quite cool to take it again now that I’ve relaxed a little bit

Also, I wanted a distraction because I have mislaid a French death certificate. I cannot for the life of me think what I have done with it If you saw my desk right now, you would actually struggle to see me, because I am being swallowed up by growing mountains of paper. I only have five files on the desk, which is by no means excessive, but my client has sent through printed information which is equivalent to several packets of printer paper and it’s just sort of swamping me. Somewhere in the middle of all this, I swear that yesterday I came across a French death certificate and an Italian death certificate. Now, I know they were there because I looked at them quite particularly to make sure they were death certificates, and because there were a couple of details I was initially unsure of, I contemplated whether it would be unethical to scan them in an send a copy to Babel for him to help me out. I didn’t reference them up and put them on file, however, because at that point in time I wasn’t auditing death benefits. And now that I am auditing death benefits, they have disappeared so completely that I would be tempted to believe they never existed, were it not for the fact that that would mean I had been hallucinating about foreign death certificates… Having been through all the paper on my desk once this morning, I am starting to get a little stressed about it, so the idea is that if I spend ten minutes doing something else I will calm down and then hopefully remember what I’ve done with them. So, erm, how straight am I?! (more…)