I had been looking forward to staying in the Hilton because I figured we might get nice rooms, so I was quite surprised when I checked in on Monday night to discover that it was the second worst hotel room I’ve ever stayed in in my entire life. The fact that it was only a single bed didn’t bother me, because I am perfectly happy sleeping in single beds, but the fact that the room was only wide enough for a single bed and so I didn’t even get a bedside table, was rather a disappointment. The second thing which struck me as I entered the room was that there was a nice long window at the far end of it. I approached this and pulled back the curtain to see what sort of view I had, and this is what confronted me…

The view from my hotel room!

Yep that’s right, I had a beautiful view of the hotel restaurant As it was evening, the restaurant was full of people eating their dinner, all of whom were able to look straight into my bedroom and see me I found it a little unnerving, and was depressed by the fact that I had to keep the curtains completely closed all week

The audit itself was as unpleasant as I expected the audit to be. The client was awkward from day one (when he refused to send out letters to his customers asking them to confirm their year end balances) to day four (when he refused to sign the report I’d written to say he agreed with it). I called my manager after this last objection to ask him what I should do. He suggested I “go upstairs and tell him to stop being a cock”

My assistant was also a pain and I have decided he has an obsession with balls. Within the course of the week he frequently used such expressions as “I’m just doing some ballpark analytics” (I’m sure that’s not what I asked him to do!), “the client just threw a curve ball” (or perhaps a curved ball, I didn’t quite catch it), and “I enjoy playing hardball” (after which I got an uncontrollable fit of giggles and had to go to the toilet to text a colleague about how weird he was!).

He turned out, however, to be the least of my problems, because on Wednesday morning my computer tragically passed away I don’t know quite what happened. I had the piece of software we use for out audit files open, and I flicked to a spreadsheet. While I was looking at the spreadsheet, the audit software closed. I tried to open it again, but it’s a very cumbersome application and once it’s crashed, the only real solution is to reboot your computer. I duly did so, but as it was loading Windows again I got a strange error message saying it had been unable to load my personal settings. Initially I wasn’t too concerned by this, but then when I tried to log into Lotus Notes which is the software we use for our email, it wouldn’t let me. Never mind, I thought, and opened the audit software. That worked fine, so I carried on auditing. After a while I needed to open a spreadsheet so I clicked on it… and received an error message saying I didn’t have authority to open that document. I tried a different spreadsheet, I tried a word document, I tried a pdf… I couldn’t open any of them. I needed one of them rather badly so I tried to copy it to a memory stick for one of my colleagues to open. It told me I didn’t have authority to make a copy.

I turned the computer on and off five times, and when there was no improvement I called our technical support guy. He was about as helpful as technical support guys generally are, but eventually it emerged that because my computer had somehow failed to load my personal settings, it didn’t realise that I was myself and therefore it had encrypted all my data and wasn’t going to let me read it. The implication being that I was now incapable of opening any document which I had previously saved on my hard drive. Oh. Dear.

The tech guy wanted me to bring my computer in immediately, which my manager said I couldn’t do on account of me being in London. So in the end he told me I’d have to struggle on for the rest of the audit and bring the computer back into him on Thursday night. Initially he wasn’t going to provide me with a replacement computer, but my manager convinced him that I needed one, and last night I did indeed manage to go into the office and effect a swap.

In the meantime, though, life was rather difficult. Funnily enough, a lot of the documents saved on my harddrive were rather important, and thus for many of them the only solution was that they needed to be redone. By me, in my spare time. What fun! Let’s just say I skipped dinner on Wednesday night and I also skipped a lot of sleep and now I feel a bit sort of dazed and dead. I was so grateful that Babel had provided me with my own computer, because otherwise I would have been screwed. There was one point where I’d spent several hours writing an important word document, was totally happy with it, clicked save and was informed that I didn’t have the authority to save word documents. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I could then switch to my personal computer and type it out again from scratch, I don’t know what I’d have done!

Somehow, and I really have no idea how, the audit was nevertheless finished by Thursday afternoon. I got a certain amount of satisfaction when we arrived at Euston yesterday evening and met up with the other audit teams who were down for the week to compare notes. One of my colleagues had also been up half the night finishing her file but she hadn’t even written her important word document, and she hadn’t had to cope with the world’s worst assistant or a malfunctioning computer, so ultimately I felt a little bit smug It was still a horrible, horrible week though. I hope next week is a little calmer!

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

I’ve been working in Banbury for the past week, one out of three which I am spending there in total. It would be a really easy place to get to if I drove, but not driving makes it more troublesome. This week I have been getting a lift off a colleague most days, but it was taking me over an hour to get to the place which she needed to pick me up from, so it wasn’t much of a treat. And often I actually prefer taking the train to getting lifts from people because I’m a bit antisocial, and anyway, the train is an opportunity to do more work. Let’s just say this job is very time-pressured

One does, of course, have to be grateful to still have a job. That’s what I have to keep telling myself after my father got reduced to a three day week this week. But generally, I am rather miserable. I really, desperately want to spend time learning Czech and had even made myself a timetable of which chapter I was going to study each week (I’m a bit sad like that!) but I have failed to fit it in all week Well, I’m getting up at half five and working until half six, getting home at half eight, eating, watching the news, responding to various emails and then falling straight asleep. It’s not a very exciting life, nor one which feels like it is achieving anything… I’m very good at feeling sorry for myself, and it’s totally unjustifiable because Babel has a cold and is therefore worse off.

It is important not to lose the ability to laugh at yourself. I was laughing at myself on Thursday when the girl giving me a lift was attending a stock take, so I got the train to Banbury. I arrived at 8.18 but Banbury station is sort of strange, and so I couldn’t find the taxi rank. Seeing as how I have Google Maps on my phone and this told me the journey to my client was less than two miles, and seeing as how I had over 40 minutes until I needed to be at work, I decided to be brave and try walking. It seemed like such a good idea…

The first problem I encountered was trying to work out where I was. The trouble with stations is that you don’t always come out of the right door – so often they have two entrances – and I blatantly wasn’t in the place where Google Maps expected me to be It took me a good fifteen minutes and a lot of careful reorientation of the map to figure out exactly where I was, and after walking in a circle for the best part of a mile, I finally arrived at the starting point for my two mile walk. Hmmm

Undaunted, however, I decided to carry on as opposed to wimping out and taking a taxi. Things went swimmingly well for the next mile or so, until construction works meant the road I wanted to walk down had the pavement obstructed. Somehow I managed to cross the very busy highway and made my way down the grass verge on the other side. When I arrived at a large traffic island, however, I was stranded for several minutes whilst I tried to figure out a way to cross without being killed, and in the end I accidentally took the wrong turning and walked another ten minutes out of my way

I am proud of myself, however, that I did realise that I was going on, and was able to navigate my way back onto the correct route. The correct route involved me walking along a muddy grass verge on a busy dual carriageway before risking life and limb by hurtling across it at speed when I needed to take a left turn. The dual carriageway which followed was even more frightening, and clearly not designed to be walked along, because the strip of grass can only have been a foot or so wide. I was genuinely terrified that when one of the lorries came past at speed, I was going to be knocked off into the road and run over.

Happily I wasn’t, and I arrived at the client only twenty minutes late. So much walking in my work shoes had taken it’s toll, however, and I now have the most horrific blisters I have ever experienced in my entire life. I could hardly stand up at all for the rest of Thursday until I was able to get home and cover my poor feet in plasters.

The moral of the story? I need to learn to drive. I am going to learn to drive. I have messaged my ex for the third time about the driving school he used to learn with, and I am practising differentiating between left and right. I intend to book a lesson very soon, but won’t do anything about it this weekend because Babel and I are planning to go to a murder mystery evening next weekend so I will be in Leicester most of the time.

Something to look forward to at least

The chaos in London yesterday does strike me as a bit ridiculous, although I do recognise that we can’t be expected to own as many snow-ploughs as the Russians. And I certainly don’t advocate anyone blaming Boris, who is the bestest mayor in the history of the world ever and the only guy I would dump Babel for Something which did make me smile yesterday, however, was what happened to the US audit partner who was flying in specially to review my file.

His flight was scheduled to arrive at Heathrow early yesterday morning, but Heathrow was of course closed due to the bad weather. As a brief aside, it also made me laugh on BBC News 24 last night when they interviewed someone from Heathrow explaining that the problem was not that they didn’t have enough snow-ploughs, but more that there was so much snow they had nowhere to put it! Anyway, our audit partner had his plane diverted elsewhere. Midmorning he rang the office in a state of extreme agitation, explaining that he was in Scotland. We all became rather agitated too, imagining that he’d been flown to Aberdeen and would have a 12 hour train journey to reach us, throwing us out on every deadline we had worked so hard to achieve. Fortunately the audit manager had the presence of mind to ask him whereabouts in Scotland he was.

Cardiff.

Now really, it is unfair to laugh at that, because there are a lot of American states I might struggle to mark on a map. The manager explained to him that Cardiff was in Wales, and further that Wales was not part of Scotland, when this seemed to be creating further confusion. It is really a very simple matter to get from Cardiff to Birmingham on a train, all the more so because there was actually no snow in Cardiff, but for some reason the Powers-That-Be had decided that it we couldn’t possibly ask an American to catch a train. The plan had originally been for him to take a taxi from Heathrow to Birmingham – OMG, can you imagine how much that would cost?!! He therefore made valiant efforts to find a taxi prepared to take him to Birmingham from Cardiff. He failed, miserably. Apparently Welsh taxi drivers were somewhat averse to driving into England.

In the end, he hired a car and people attempted to give him directions from this end. He managed to find the M5 but went down it in the wrong direction and ended up in Bristol Worse, he didn’t realise that Bristol wasn’t Birmingham (well, they both begin with B!) and caused great confusion when he announced his arrival at my company’s office there. By the time he finally arrived in Birmingham it was gone half four in the afternoon, which meant he had a mere hour to review my audit file – hardly enough time to make any criticism at all

He was one angry guy though, having come from Denver, Colorado where they are accustomed to an awful lot more snow that we have here!

I could write at great and tedious length about how much I hate the town of Wantage. If you saw it yourself, you might not think there was anything particularly objectionable about it, but if I add it up now I have spent no fewer than 14 weeks in this place over the course of the past few years, and it has begun to become wearing. The attractions of Wantage are severely limited, the highlight being a small branch of Waitrose which stocks an extensive selection of approximately six different sandwiches. Compare this to the even smaller branch of Boots, which stocks approximately three different sandwiches, and you have covered the entire lunchtime eating possibilities of the town in one fell swoop. That is to say, there is also an independent sandwich shop where in days gone by I confess that I have made the occasional purchase, but a colleague subsequently pointed out some of their rather unhygienic food practices to me, and after that I began to view it more as a health hazard than a nutritional opportunity. Apart from the afore-mentioned shops, the town boasts a small newsagents which admittedly sells Wispas, a statue of Alfred the Cake, and the only hotel I have encountered in my entire life that I would refuse to stay in ever again. Impressive.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have taken against Wantage so much, were it not for the fact that it is the home of my most troublesome client. Due to some complicated US stock exchange regulations which are beyond my understanding, the UK manufacturing company which I audit needs to have its audit report signed off by the end of January. Bearing in mind that the client year end is December 31st, the accounts team didn’t come back off holiday until January 6th, and the audit started on January 15th, it’s perhaps not difficult to understand why I turned up on the first day to find that they hadn’t even had time to open the extensive list of required information which we had sent to them before Christmas, much less to actually prepare any of it Hmmm. Things were so bad on the first day that we actually considered coming back home again, but in the end my superior decided that it would be better for us to remain on site so that we could maintain pressure on the client to get stuff done.

It sounded like a good idea in theory, but in reality trying to put pressure on an already stressed client to get stuff done is not very much fun at all The whole matter was complicated somewhat by the fact that the very competent financial accountant which the entity used to employ left at the end of October. She was replaced by a woman in respect of whom it would require a great stretch of imagination to describe as competent. In fact, as the audit progressed over the course of the next three weeks, we began to doubt whether she could even be described as an accountant. Without wishing to be unduly rude and offensive, it is nevertheless true that she was found via a recruitment agency and offered the permanent position after a couple of weeks, however nearly two months later the company still hasn’t managed to obtain her references. She assures me that there is a good reason for this, and proceeded to tell me a very long and complicated story which involved her immediate superior being struck down by a brain tumour and regrettably losing his memory, but combined with her apparently extreme lack of accounting ability, it began to sound a little suspicious!

I have to say that despite the fact that this woman is outwardly perfectly pleasant, she is one of the only clients ever to come close to reducing me to tears. Right from the start I felt as if I was fighting a losing battle against her. Every day I would go to speak to her and explain to the best of my ability what it was that I required. Now I know I am not a person with the world’s best communication skills, but in my defense I have to say that I do not normally have problems communicating with my clients, and having worked at this particular factory so many times already, I was fairly confident that I knew exactly what I was asking for and what I could expect to receive. It would, however, have been more satisfying to try communicating with a brick wall. It felt like whatever I said to this woman, she managed to misunderstand. Every time I asked her a question, she answered a different one, or started by answering something akin to my question but then went off at a random tangent telling me about her family, her life, how much better her last job was than this one, how she thinks the woman who did this job before her was hopeless, etc, etc etc. As a result, it would be very easy for me to write a report on her son’s love life, explaining all about how his ex-wife married someone else, got divorced for a second time, and then moved in with a woman, but it would be far more challenging for me to write down anything sensible which this woman managed to communicate to me about her US GAAP adjustments I’ve never encountered anything quite like it – she was an absolute nightmare!

Even now, I’m not entirely sure whether she is utterly, completely stupid, or whether she was just being deliberately obstructive. I’m inclining towards the view that she was being deliberately obstructive, purely because of an incident which happened on the first Wednesday. The first Wednesday was a good week into the audit, seeing as how we started on a Thursday, and so by this stage it was reasonably expected that we would have accomplished quite a lot of audit testing. For this reason, my supervisor had come down from Birmingham for the day to assess the progress we were making. I was exceptionally stressed already, because the progress we were making was nowhere near the sort of progress she expected we should have been making, the client being half the problem and the other problem being someone I’ll talk about a bit later! We had genuinely been working very hard, but there didn’t seem like there was a lot to show for it. I was trying to explain to the supervisor just how difficult the client was being, without making it sound like I intensely disliked her or as if I was trying to make excuses for my own under-achievement. Unfortunately, the client obviously realised that my supervisor was an important person who shouldn’t be messed around, and chose Wednesday to be on her best behaviour. I nearly choked, when after a week of being utterly uncooperative whenever I so much as asked her for a bank statement, she started making the effort to walk down two flights of stairs to provide the piece of paper my supervisor had asked for. It kind of diminished the credibility of what I was trying to say That was annoying enough, but it was at 5.30 that the piece de resistance came! I had been trying, for an entire week now, to obtain a very important spreadsheet called the Reserves Reconciliation. If you don’t know a lot about accounting then this probably won’t mean much to you, but this spreadsheet was supposed to reconcile the value of the client’s profit and loss reserve per their own local trial balance to the value of their profit and loss reserve per the figures they were reporting to the US parent company for the purposes of the group consolidation. If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, I’ll add that per their own local trial balance they had positive reserves of £10m. Per the figures they were reporting to the US, they had reserves of negative £5m. It might sound strange, but the difference was perfectly legitimate, being the result of accounting entries which are allowed under (the rather slack) American accounting standards but totally unpermissable in the UK, as well as a culmination of some rather random debits and credits which had taken place in the prior period following a management buyout. The point was, I needed these debits and credits detailed so that I could make a stab at auditing them. In the prior year, the client had provided a very nice spreadsheet which made the transactions as clear as transactions which are as clear as mud can possibly be. This year, the new accountant informed me that such a spreadsheet didn’t exist and she wasn’t going to prepare one for me.

The solution might have been to go over her head and talk to her boss, the financial controller. This is indeed precisely what I would have done, were it not for the fact that the financial controller happened to be in Illinois. I hasten to add that this was not a holiday but a working visit to group headquarters, nevertheless it was an exceptionally inconvenient circumstance in terms of the UK audit, and we had already made a complaint about it to Group. In his absence, I had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time attempting to reconcile the reserves myself. Actually, I had managed it, in so far as I had figured out what adjustments had been made to get from figure one to figure two. Why those adjustments had been made or whether they were correct was more than I was able to deduce unaided however, and so I had come to a rather frustrated full stop. I reported this to my supervisor, who went up to take the client to task about it.

And what happened? The minute the supervisor spoke to her about it, the client said “Oh the reserves reconciliation? Yes we’ve got one of those, it’s in the year end file with all the other audit information!”. And lo and behold, my supervisor came downstairs with a copy of the reconciliation I had wasted my evenings reperforming from scratch, as well as an entire file of wholly useful information which the client had declined to tell me existed. I was so angry, I nearly burst into tears on the spot. I mean, apart from the fact that I had wasted so much time, this made me look rather bad and let’s just say my supervisor was far from sympathetic. I protested that not only had I explained to this woman until I was blue in the face that I needed the reserves reconciliation and showed her a copy of last years in case she wasn’t quite sure what it was, I had actually sat next to her for hours whilst she attempted to help me perform it. She was perfectly well aware of the work I was doing, and seemingly also perfectly well aware that it had already been done by someone else and was sitting completed in the folder behind her desk. Unbelievable

It looked so much like I had just been inadequate at explaining what I wanted from her that I was pretty much in despair that night. The supervisor said to expect a bollocking from the manager if she found out how much time had been wasted and gave me a look like I was stupid. I was very, very fed up and thinking I might have to give up interaction with the real world and become a hermit, because I was obviously more inadequate than I thought.

You know what though? It really wasn’t my fault. I finally became certain of that a couple of days later when my colleague, who no one could possibly accuse of having a communication problem, had a pretty much identical issue. She had wasted in excess of a day of her time trying to reperform some foreign currency translations which the client had put through their books to revalue certain assets at the year end, and she was totally unable to understand why she was getting a massive difference between what she thought the adjustment should be and the adjustment which had actually been made. Again, she had spent hours talking to the main client accountant woman about this issue, and in the end I felt sorry for her and went upstairs to see if I could get to the bottom of it myself. It just so happened that when I went upstairs, the obnoxious financial accountant had gone to make a cup of tea, so I ended up talking to the very friendly sales ledger clerk instead. I casually mentioned to her what the problem was, she took one look at the exchange rates my colleague had been using in the calculation, and informed me that they were the wrong ones. Let me hasten to add that these exchange rates had been provided by the evil accountant lady, after my colleague had explained quite clearly which exchange rates it was that she needed (the client uses slightly different rates at different times for different transactions). I was rather annoyed about this misinformation, and when the accountant reappeared I went over to tackle her about it. I explained to her the details of what had happened, she gave me a sarcastic sort of look and said, “Oh dear, I seem to have led you up the garden path again!” in a most unpleasant tone of voice. I couldn’t think of anything to do expect walk away. When I went back downstairs and explained to my colleague that she’d been using the wrong rates, she then actually did burst into tears because she thought no one would believe her that she’d asked for the right ones..

Aaaarggh. The result of all this was that we had to get up at six and get to the client before eight, work until sevenish when they lock up, head back to the hotel for a quick meal and then go to our rooms and work again. That would have made for a stressful enough time, but things got worse. Oh yes, by week two we were in possession of the assistant from hell!

I don’t even know where to start with describing this assistant. He’s the worst sort of geek. Someone who has a certain amount of intelligence undoubtedly,but who has become accustomed to being told he has a lot more intelligence than everybody else, and therefore believes it. He had a scholarship at a very posh private school, and some of the work he did on his degree course means that he is exempt from sitting certain professional examinations which the rest of us have had to take. This all combines to make him feel like he is the bee’s knees, and let’s just say he’s not someone who is shy at expressing that to other people.

I’ve never had an issue with anybody else on an audit when I’ve asked them to do something and they’ve refused because they thought they knew better than me what should be done. This is a guy who utterly refused to take direction or to believe that anybody else’s opinion could possibly be more valid than his. At the start of each day I offered to run through with him exactly what work I wanted him to perform and how he should go about achieving it, and he always knocked me back. A couple of times I forced the issue and made him listen to what I had to say, but it didn’t appear to have a noticeable impact so eventually I gave up. If my colleague told him to do something, he would wait for her to leave the room, then ask me the same question to see whether I’d give the same answer or whether I’d decide he didn’t have to do it after all. He was also rather rude in his manner to my colleague, who came to the profession straight from school so clearly isn’t entitled to an opinion on anything at all, and when we came to review his work… My God! I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Having obviously been allocated the most straight-forward and low risk part of the audit testing to perform, he had nevertheless managed to create one of the most complicated spreadsheets in the history of the known universe, so unnecessarily complicated that not only could I not understand it, neither could the supervisor, the manager, the audit partner, or the member of client staff who had provided him with the information.

After a week in which he not only wasted his own time and my time, but insulted the other team member, caused a scene in the hotel reception, and nearly killed us by adjusting his satnav by driving, we were fortunately able to spend the third week without him, on the grounds that he was causing more detriment than good. I spent a couple of hours trying to get my head round what he had done, eventually sort of got there, concluded it was completely wrong, so deleted it and started again from scratch. Meanwhile we struggled to compose an appraisal which was sufficiently harsh, whilst still being fair. Constructive criticism is not an easy thing to get right, and I was wary of contributing too much because I will be completely honest and say I can’t stand this guy at all and I wish I never had to work with him again. I don’t know, perhaps on a normal job he wouldn’t be so bad but the constant togetherness of an away job made him unbearable. My colleague and I resorted to having a glass of wine with our evening meal to enable us to cope with the stress of dining with him. No really, I wouldn’t normally have a glass of wine when I was going back up to my room to do an evening’s work, but it really was necessary to unwind

Oh dear, I am moaning too much In the end the audit did get done. The manager came down to review on the Monday and was nowhere near as rude to me as I had been expected. With her permission, we came back to Birmingham on Tuesday night and worked from our own offices on Wednesday, on the grounds that the client had a day off. On Thursday we went back down, and there was so much still to be done it was unbelievable. The end of audit meeting was on Friday morning, and not only did all audit tests have to be signed off in a satisfactory manner by then, but I had to write the report summarising our findings which we would present both to the client and the US auditors. I had my first draft done by Tuesday lunchtime, but then followed the tedious rigmarole of incorporating other people’s suggestions. I sent it to the supervisor first, who seemed a little dubious as to what sort of report I was capable of producing and wanted to vet it without the manager’s knowledge before I sent it to her. She made some very valid suggestions of things I could include, for which I was grateful. It was amusing, however, when I then sent it on to the manager, how many of the things I had just been told to add in, the manager then saw fit to take out. The supervisor had asked me to add an extensive paragraph on the standard costing for example, which must have taken me a good hour to compose in a client-facing manner, only for the manager to put a single strike through the entire bulk of it, leaving only my opening sentence. The supervisor had also asked me to comment on the gross margin per product line, and the manager put a strike through that without even an explanation. She then requested I add a couple more points, which the partner in turn crossed out following her review. And so on, and so on, and so on!

By Thursday lunch time we finally had a draft which the partner was happy with, and so the manager emailed it to the client FD and FC. No sooner had she done so then she sent me an email headed “Prepare for the enslaught (sic) from upstairs!”, reminding me that during the 2006 audit the FD had disliked our commentary so much that he had actually emerged from the sanctuary of his office and come running down the stairs to object to it. I was quite perplexed that for hours nothing happened, but I didn’t go chasing them for comments because to be honest, I had quite enough work to do without processing further amendments. At half five the manager emailed me to ask what the response had been and ordered me to go and find out, because she and the audit partner had tickets to see Mamma Mia that night, hence needed to leave the office by six. I went upstairs in a state of extreme trepidation, only to be told by the FC that he thought it was a good report and he only had three minor changes to propose. Cool :happy:

Unfortunately I had not got tickets for a musical, and in fact I was staying down in Wantage by myself on Thursday night so I didn’t even have a lift to the hotel. I called a taxi at about twenty past six, and when it still hadn’t arrived by seven o clock I called again, only to be told that there were some hefty traffic jams in the town centre. By the time the taxi finally did arrive, transported me over to the Premier Inn some ten miles away and I had managed to check in and find my room, it was nearly eight o clock. Here was a dilemma for me. I had at least four hours work to do, and I knew that after midnight I would probably be too tired to do anything productive. However, I hadn’t had any dinner, and for lunch all I had had was a cheese roll. Not a very nice cheese roll I had to make a major decision: work, or food?! Anyone who knows me properly will realise that I generally care about food an awful lot more than I care about work, and should therefore be utterly shocked that I sacrificed my meal. I am still utterly shocked at my own commitment and dedication, if the truth be known Happily the hotel had a vending machine, however, and so I didn’t waste away, instead managing to sustain myself with a packet of crisps and getting pretty much all of my work done

I was very scared about the meeting the next morning but it actually went fine and no one asked me any questions I didn’t know the answer to. I was almost equally scared about the two-hour drive home in the manager’s car, but even that wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I realise it is very boring when people complain about their jobs, and I also realise that a lot of people have worse jobs than mine, so now I’ve had that rant I’m going to shut up now and talk about something else tomorrow. On the bright side, I have just had a very refreshing weekend with Babel, and I have a nice quiet week in the office to look forward to. Plus January is officially over – woohoo!!! :happy:

I am writing a more cheerful blogpost about my visit to Munich, honestly. It’s partially written and saved on my phone at the moment, although I don’t know when I’ll finish it. Tomorrow is the audit department Christmas lunch, followed by the company social club Christmas party, and I’m not especially looking forward to either. I don’t like parties at the best of times, and I don’t like work parties in particular because I don’t feel like I have a lot in common with most of the people I work with. I get on with them on a professional basis, of course, and can chat to them about work matters, but outside of work I wouldn’t choose to speak to most of them if I didn’t have to. Normally I spend the Christmas party talking to one friend in particular, but it turns out he can’t make it this year because he’s on a training course So now I feel a little depressed about that too and wish I’d just booked the day off as holiday, which I would have done months ago were it not for a glitch in the holiday booking system which meant that my holiday entitlement is showing incorrectly.

You may not have guessed, but I don’t feel at all Christmassy. Bah, humbug!

And God, was it dark?! I was aiming to leave home as close to six as I could, due to the buses into the city centre being infrequent and unreliable at that time of the morning. I naively hadn’t appreciated that at such an hour on a December morning it was going to be pitch black, so when I stepped outside the door on Monday morning I got quite a nasty shock. I am not anywhere near as scared of the dark as I used to be. I can remember when I was twelve and started secondary school, literally running the five minutes between the bus stop and my house practically in tears because I was so frightened to be outside in it on my own. The dark of the evenings doesn’t bother me so much now, I walk home in it every evening and it rarely registers with me. But the dark of the early morning is another thing altogether. The dark of the early morning is quieter and lonelier. I think it’s actually the loneliness of it which gets to me more than the darkness, because once I get to the street lamps and occasional passing car on the main road, I feel safe and stop panicking. But on my road, which is lit very inadequately and has little passing traffic, I freely admit that I am terrified. I couldn’t leave the drive each day without looking backwards to check no one was going to be following me. With this established, I would set off at a reasonable pace, telling myself in my head that this was all perfectly fine and nothing to worry about at all. But strangely, it seems the closer I get to the relative sanctuary of the high street, the more I begin to fear that something is going to stop me reaching it, and so it was that after two or three minutes of measured walking I would find myself jogging the last few hundred metres. Which was interesting, carrying a heavy rucksack along a pavement covered in ice. I only fell over once

Once I got safely to New Street station, the main excitement of the day would begin, with the Battle to Get a Seat on the Train. The rules of engagement are as follows. One must get to the platform long before the train is due to arrive, and stand there nonchalently as if one is not expecting a train at all and has merely come out at this time of the morning for the air. You should take care never to stand on the part of the platform where you actually wish to board the train. When it arrives, and a door stops perfectly level with you, it is necessary to ignore this, sprint several carriages up the station, and push in in front of someone else because you always like to sit in carriage C, not carriage F. The best way to board the train is with your elbows jutting out and balancing a cup of coffee. Extra points are awarded if you can manage to do this whilst conducting a conversation on your mobile phone. Once you are on the train you have several options. You can walk up and down the train in the opposite direction to everybody else, trying to find an imaginary seat reservation you’re sure you asked your secretary to make. You can get on and block the entire gangway with your briefcase whilst you remove your pinstripe jacket in a leisurely fashion and fold it into the overhead locker. It is imperative that at no point do you speak or acknowledge the existance of another human being, especially if you tread on them…

To be fair, the trains to London Euston are very nice. Although they would want to be, for 123 quid a ticket. And I wasn’t impressed on Tuesday to have paid that amount of money only to have my train cancelled and have to board the next one, which would not in itself have been a dreadful problem were it not for the other 300 people who were doing the same thing. The result was that I stood all the way to the Big Smoke, and it was one of the longest hour and forty five minutes of my life

The offices where I was working were in the vicinity of Moorgate tube station, which was rather convenient because it’s on the Northern line from Euston. I was quite impressed, because I managed to work out which of the four northern line platforms I needed to be standing at, then managed not only to board the train in the correct direction, but also to get off at the stop I was intending to. For someone with a sense of direction like mine, that is indeed an achievement

I successfully located my junior at Moorgate on Monday morning and we found our way to the client. I shan’t even attempt to talk about the junior here, because if I did I would get incredibly wound up and never stop. I rarely end up working with people I utterly loathe, but I think he might just be the exception to my rule. Suffice it to say, once we’d got our computers out his first thought was not to go figure out where the kitchen was so we could get a coffee, but to ask me how “we” were going to decide who did what work and, when I allocated some work to him (me being the one who’s incharge and qualified and all), he queried whether I thought that was a good use of his time. Grrr!

All in all he was quite a weird guy, but believe me, if you stood him next to the client accountant, there was no contest. I can honestly say, I have never encountered such an inherently weird client in my entire life. His own boss, who is happily located a long way away from him in Australia, described him as “subhuman” – that’s how weird he is He was the sort of person who can’t look you in the eye when you’re talking, who can’t even utter a coherent sentence, and especially not one which bears any relation to what you just said. I would say that this could all be explained by the fact that he uses Linux, but I do actually know some people who use Linux and still manage to conduct conversations which don’t revolve around the evils of the Microsoft empire

The audit was happily rather easy, and although I got very grumpy travelling home every night through lack of food, I managed to get enough work done on site between Monday and Wednesday to justify working from the office in Birmingham on Thursday and Friday, and so I was reasonably happy

This Saturday was the day my sister and I had bookmarked for doing our entire Christmas shopping, and I looked forward to it with something akin to extreme trepidation, because I had no idea what sort of presents we were going to get for most people. In an attempt to miss the worst of the hellish Christmas crowds in the Bull Ring, we got to town just after nine and so had a couple of hours to walk around the shops in a confused and bewildered state before things really hotted up. It all seemed to take a terribly long time, but ultimately we were quite successful in our purchases. We bought my Dad a rather snazzy pair of cufflinks from Marks and Spencers, which was doubly good because I had some vouchers left so we saved £20 We needed to get two presents for my Mom because her birthday is over Christmas as well, which promised to be a little stressful, but in the end we did quite well, buying her something lacy from the German market for Christmas, and a beautiful Royal Albert mug for her birthday. We split up for a brief hour as well, which just gave me time to get a present for my sister as well, and of course at long last I managed to get something for Babel. I confess I had been a little stumped for ideas, having used up all my imagination for his birthday present, but literally on the bus that morning I had an idea for something he needed, and my sister helped me choose what will hopefully be something good

No shopping trip would of course be complete without a fair amount of eating and drinking. We started off with a frappe latte at a delightful branch of Caffe Nero which I have only just discovered in the city centre. Later in the afternoon we braved the vicious crowds at the German market, and managed to buy a rather delicious sausage in a roll over at the unfashionable side We had wanted to buy a cup of flavoured coffee to round it all off, but after a bit of confusion with the man on the stall, it transpired that he was only serving Irish Cream or Jamaica Rum, neither of which flavours we fancied, so we ended up with a take-away cup from Costa instead. After that we headed home pretty swiftly, having had just about enough of being bashed around in a sea of angry shoppers.

Sunday was a more relaxing day I finally got the lie in which I’d been dreaming about all week, and then in the afternoon Babel came over to pick me up and we went to our favourite Harvester for a spot of lunch. Being a little devoid of ideas for how to spend the afternoon, we figured we might pop into Redditch and watch a film at the cinema. I was absolutely positive there was a cinema in Redditch, and once we had negotiated our way round the ringroad a couple of times we discovered that indeed there was, but much to our disappointment, the only thing it appeared to be showing before 6pm was Madagascar 2. It didn’t look like my cup of tea, and we hadn’t seen Madagascar 1 anyway, so in the end we just had a little bit of a look around the shops and a leisurely coffee in Costa.

Mi ne volis reveni hejmen antaux la sesa, cxar mi ne volis cxeesti meson. Mi trinkis glason da rugxa vino kun mia tagmangxo, kaj estas granda peko cxeesti meson kiam oni estas ebria Babel tre afable konsentis veturigi min sencele dum preskaux horo, kaj kiam ni alproksimigxis al mia domo, li havis tre bonan ideon Do, ni atendis gxis miaj gepatroj forlasis la domon, tiam eniris kaj faris ion, kion oni vere ne faru en la domo de siaj gepatroj, aparte kiam ili estas en pregxejo. Estis tamen tre gxuinda sperto…

That was definitely the highlight of my weekend It was lovely to see Babel, and cheered me up as usual. The next few weeks until Christmas look set to be rubbish in terms of work – today is making me thoroughly miserable – but at least I have a nice memory of yesterday to hang onto

What news do I have? My line manager, who I don’t necessarily dislike but who thinks I am totally incompetent, has just been promoted to the status of Director. Director means he’s not quite a partner yet, but will be as soon as one of the existing partners dies and/or leaves. The upside of this is that he bought cakes to celebrate, and I was lucky enough to get a pink doughnut with sugary sprinkles on it. The downside is that he now has even more power than ever before, and it’s not necessarily advantageous for someone who has a mental black mark against my name to be in a position of increased power. That is to say, I assumed he would still be my line manager, but after talking to a friend of mine she pointed out that directors probably aren’t anybody’s line manager, and thus I might be allocated a new line manager. This is a potentially unfortunate situation; there is one person in the office who, if she became my line manager, would give me no option but to leave.

On the theme of leaving, the afore-mentioned friend of mine put me in touch with some recruitment consultants a couple of weeks okay. After a bit of help from Babel, I finally managed to get my CV to them this week, and have had a couple of calls since. This lunch time I spoke to a guy who was trying to recruit newly qualifieds to move to one of the Big Four accountancy firms. I had ignored his call several times, but eventually felt that politeness demanded I call him back. Essentially, I have no interest in moving to a Big Four firm. One of the things which makes me hate this job is the incessant travelling, and I have absolutely no desire to work for a firm which would demand more travelling and longer hours. Yes, they probably pay £5k more than what I’m on at the moment, but if you divided the salary by the hours I’d have to work, I think it might potentially work out as a lower hourly rate!

His call, then, would not have been particularly interesting, were it not for the fact that I mentioned I had been referred by my friend. He commented that he knew her, and that she was causing him to tear his hair out because after he’d gone to all the trouble of arranging interviews for her, she had got a job at [insert name of Big Four firm] through a personal contact there.

This was news to me, bearing in mind that I had spoken to the said friend only a couple of hours previously. I called her back after lunch, and she was rather horrified that I knew, because she hasn’t handed her notice in yet. Both of us were obviously limited in what we could say, being at work, but in coded language she confirmed that what I’d been told by the recruitment guy was true, and she was indeed moving on.

She’s going to call me later tonight to tell all, but I must say I’m rather sad and will miss her

Anyway, the upshot of all these phone calls is that I have a meeting with a different recruitment consultant tomorrow lunch time. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to say, since I’m not really actively looking for something specific, and Babel and I still haven’t started looking for somewhere to live. I genuinely don’t think now is terribly good time to move into industry, because all our clients are making big redundancy cuts, even in their finance teams. But I thought I might as well go along for the hell of it and see what they said; it’s always good to have options

I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t mind working here and would like to stay for a little longer. I can’t realistically stay for longer than two years, because I’m not good enough to make it to manager, and after three years a lack of promotion would make me a departmental embarrassment. So I do need to think of something else to do, and some days I can’t wait to get out. This morning, for example, I spent four hours checking a 98 page Word document to a 98 page pdf version of the same document, to confirm that there weren’t any discrepancies. There was the odd thing wrong – a missed comma, a heading not in bold, an incorrect page number – but on the whole the two documents were utterly identical, and after four hours of staring at the size eight font, my eyes had gone square Yesterday afternoon, however, I spent some time posting some last minute adjustments through a set of financial statements, and despite the fact that they were in Microsoft Word and I’m not generally very good at debits and credits, they all ended up balancing and I was quite chuffed

So on the whole, my feelings with regard to life, the universe and everything are rather mixed today. The good news is that swallowing the tic-tac doesn’t appear to have killed me But it is perhaps sad that swallowing a tic-tac is the most exciting thing to have happened in my day

Not so.

Our entire Transactions Services department has just been sent home, on the grounds that there are no longer any transactions for them to service. Some of them have been offered redeployment within the insolvency department which, funnily enough, suddenly has a whole load of work on.

The entire office admin team has also been put on notice, while they decide how many of them they want to keep.

No one has done us the courtesy of telling us whether there are going to be redundancies in audit, so currently we’re just sitting here and waiting to see what happens, whilst unsettling rumours abound.

I must say I hate this job, but it will mess up an awful lot of plans if I lose it

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

The manager for whom I am working this week is an individual who I dislike intensely. Were I not so busy working, I would be running a sweepstake on how many times she can email me from three metres away during any given 8.5 hour period. She has done nothing but throw crap at me all week, and then when I actually do what she tells me, she proceeds to undermine me. I was absolutely livid this morning, because in between pension scheme audits she had asked me to plan the audit I am in-charging for her next week. Planning an audit is a substantial task – normally two days work – so I’ve kind of been struggling to fit it into my spare time. One of the key tasks which needs to be completed is determining the financial statement materiality. Essentially, the way audits work is that we don’t issue a report saying that the financial statements are correct – that would be a physically impossibility and leave us open to being sued for an awful lot of money – so instead we issue a report which says that the financial statements are not materially misstated. It follows then, that before you can do anything much else, you need to determine a figure above which you will determine an error to be ‘material’. Unfortunately you can’t just pick this figure out of thin air; there are accepted methods for calculating it, and you have to document and justify every step you take so that it will stand up in a court of law.

Now for this particular client that I am auditing, we had come to a decision with the partner that materiality was going to be set at 1% of turnover, which is a fairly reasonable sort of figure. It does, however, demand that you know what turnover for the year is going to be… which we didn’t, because the client hadn’t sent us through any draft accounts. The manager therefore emailed the client, copying me in, and requesting he send us some figures immediately. This was on Monday evening, and she followed it up ten minutes later by sending me (sitting opposite her) an email informing me it was too late to ring the client now, but I needed to do it before 11am on Tuesday to ensure we got the information we required. So, at ten o clock on Tuesday I phoned the client, had a nice little chat, and ten minutes later was emailed a copy of the figures. I went to share this good news with the manager, and she effectively told me to pipe down because she was busy. Fine. I set materiality at £68k, finished the rest of the planning that evening at home, and the next day emailed her to say the work was complete and back on the network ready for review. Imagine my surprise then when I get to work this morning to find she has sent an abusive email to the very same client, demanding to know why he hasn’t sent us any numbers. If she had read what I had written or even glanced at the work she had asked me to do in my free time because it was so ‘urgent’ she would have instantly seen that not only had he provided the numbers, but I’d produced two spreadsheets of ratios analysing them. But she was too flipping lazy to do it, with the result that now the client (who I have to spend the next week with and desperately need to be in a cooperative frame of mind) is highly pissed off by our lack of professionality, and this is all *my* fault because my communication skills are inadequate. Right.

It just kind of makes you wonder what the point of trying is I am annoyed to be working on this client in general, because it is one of the three clients which I estimate that my office has, whose premises are entirely inaccessible by public transport. Given that I am the only person in the office who is entirely dependent on public transport, I seem a slightly illogical choice to lead the audit at best. I did actually question the manager on this point earlier in the week, seeing as a colleague of mine who is at the same level as me and possesses a perfectly functional car has nothing on next week. I went as far as to suggest it might be more convenient if he were to do the work instead, and I could carry on with the pension schemes. But oh no, he’s a guy and the entity which I am going to audit is a charity. For reasons which are utterly beyond me, there is an unspoken rule that guys don’t audit charities or pension schemes, as if it would somehow be demeaning for them to lower themselves to such things. And besides, I am apparently the designated charities expert

Erm, yeah, I’ve worked on two charity audits before, and everybody else who has ever audited a charity has now left, so yippee – at last I have a claim to fame. I expressed the desire that if I was supposed to be an expert on charity auditing – which is rather different to normal auditing – that I might be allowed to go on some sort of charity auditing training, which might serve to ensure that I had a slight idea what I was supposed to be doing. I was told that no, they’d never sent anyone on that sort of training before, and if I got stuck I ought to read the website of the Charities Commission.

So, I have been reading the website of the Charities Commission on my journeys to and from work, and I have even downloaded a copy of the SORP for if I get bored of Babel at the weekend I must say that I am not terribly impressed by the Charities Commission website as a whole, and am struggling to find the information I require. Locating the SORP was fairly easy, but when I downloaded it there was a note informing me that it had been updated in July 2008. I am sure this note was designed to be helpful, but for those not intimately acquainted with the SORP, it’s more of a worry than anything else, because there’s no further detail as to what has been updated and why. Short of trying to obtain an out-dated version and comparing all 130 odd pages until I find a difference, I am at a loss to know how I shall ever be any the wiser

Sigh. The good news about next week is that I think I have convinced my assistant to give me a lift. That is to say, I rang her last week and asked her if she would, and she said yes, but it was all rather embarrassing because I’ve never actually met her before. And at the point at which she actually agreed, she was in the middle of a fire alarm drill at college with the result that there was a lot of background noise, so I guess I better call her tomorrow and check that it’s still all okay.

Tomorrow is going to be a horrible day and I’ve got no idea how I’m going to get through even a fraction of the stuff I need to. My main problem is that I’m trying to finalise the accounts of a pension scheme where the administrators are unable to tell me a) how many pensioners are in the scheme or b) how much pension they are paying them. If it wasn’t me who was responsible for sorting it out, that would be amusing

To top it all off nicely, it is the Wrong Time of the Month, and it seems to be a particularly bad Wrong Time of the Month this time around. From Saturday onwards I’ve been having a bad case of PMT which has made me prone to burst into tears if anyone so much as says ‘boo’ to me. Saturday it was a message from Babel which set me off, Sunday it was an altercation with my mother, Monday it was a text message which came so out of the blue I had to spend half an hour in the toilets at work trying to calm down… From Tuesday onwards I began to feel emotionally a little more stable, but physically totally rubbish, although I have formed the hypothesis that a certain amount of low-level pain increases productivity. Seriously, right, all week I’ve been having random lower back pain which has been uncomfortable, though obviously not agonising, and much in the same way which the discomfort of kneeling on a cold floor concentrates the mind on prayer, I think being in a small amount of pain helps to concentrate the mind on work, or whatever task is in hand. Somehow it makes me more focussed, and less inclined to waste energy checking my emails

Once pain gets to a certain level, unfortunately, it then becomes harmful to productivity because you can’t actually sit still long enough to write a sentence. This is where I would like to sing the praises of Nurofen Plus with extra caffeine, which I finally succumbed to taking two tablets of this morning when it all got too much. Within half an hour, the pain was back down to a manageable level and I was able to sit back down at my desk I would particularly recommend it to anyone who is trying to lose weight, because if your stomach is anything like mine, fifteen minutes after taking it you will start to feel so sick that you won’t want to eat anything for the next 24 hours. If you’re not trying to lose weight and actually quite fancy a spot of lunch, this is rather a down side, so ultimately I guess it comes down to a personal choice as to whether you prefer feeling sick to being in pain. Personally I prefer feeling sick, in so far as it is possible to prefer such a thing, but it isn’t a painkiller I take on a regular basis because I always have the vague impression that it’s the sort of thing which might cause ulcers if overused, and having a friend who has an ulcer, I know that it’s not pleasant Although – and I’m sure this isn’t just my imagination playing tricks on me – didn’t Feeder once sing a song about Nurofen Plus?! I’m sure they did, but I can’t remember what it was called

Can I find anything else to moan about? In between bouts of feeling sorry for myself, I have been failing to sleep because I am so worried about Babel, who I care about so much and is working much harder than he ought to I tried to have Stern Words with him about it earlier in the week, but I don’t think that it probably succeeded terribly well, so today I went on an expedition to buy him some Ritter Sport to make amends. There appears to be one supermarket in Birmingham who stocks this most delightful of all chocolate, and it is just about a walkable distance from my office. That is to say, 25 minutes away which obviously isn’t far, but when lunch is only an hour and you have to get there and back, it’s only just about doable… and I was on a mission to get back from lunch before the hated manager (who had gone to the pub) realised that I’d nipped out. I went out to buy a bottle of water earlier in the week, and she asked me what I thought I was doing

This supermarket is located in the Well Dodgy part of town, and if you have more time there than I did, you can play a fun game where you try to track down someone else in the building who is speaking English. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to enjoy such cultural highlights, because I was trying to both buy a bar of chocolate and replenish my stock of toiletries. Oh yes, this is another rant of the week! I have a certain drawer in my bedroom where I keep a stock of certain hygiene products. Now, these items are mine. That is to say, I have bought them myself, with my own money – they have not been bought as part of the general shopping out of the general household budget. If someone finds that they have run out of such items and they desperately need them, I am more than happy for them to borrow from my drawer, and in fact it’s the only drawer in my room which I wouldn’t question anybody opening. But what I do not expect, is to open the drawer one evening and to find that persons unknown have spirited away the entire contents of the drawer for their own personal use. If you borrow something, you should replace it. If you can’t replace it, you should at least inform me so that I can replace it myself. Clearly, I am only going to open the drawer when I need something which is in there. If, being in that position, I open it and find it is unexpectedly empty, clearly I am going to be highly pissed off. It cost me £5 at the supermarket this lunchtime to repurchase the items I should have had in stock, and I am singularly unimpressed by what I regard as an inexcusable lack of courtesy

Oh dear, I really am grumpy tonight

Nah, the upside was that at least Babel’s chocolate was in stock, although finding it was in itself a little problematic and involved me getting lost in the vegetable display. It’s a rather large supermarket, and I wasn’t sure where they kept the chocolate…

I’m sure I must have some good news! I got paid this week, which was nice. I still feel faintly surprised every time I get paid But the down side was that they took £50 more tax off me this month than last and I don’t think I stand much chance of ever working on why, because my payslip is so complicated these days. There’s some sort of complicated tax calculation relating to what I have to pay for the privelege of having life insurance, private healthcare benefit and the like, and understanding it is beyond me.

What else? I have volunteered to teach Esperanto to people in Africa via email. I’m not sure this is good news, I only really volunteered so that Babel wouldn’t feel obliged to. So far I’ve been contacted by a guy from Ghana and have managed to obtain the necessary copies of the EAB postal course to send him, but I feel a little embarrassed about the whole business. My Esperanto really isn’t good enough to be teaching other people

Other than that, not much to report. Babel and I are off to Esperanto House for the weekend, so hopefully that will be a nice opportunity to relax and not feel so stressed, and next week I should have something nice to blog about