All things considered, I’m a young senior. For some engagements I have seniors above me. On one of my major engagements, I have 4 seniors above me, which makes me a small fry in the team.
Sometimes, it’s good to be a small fry.
- Means somebody else is dealing with all the crap that comes his/her way, thereby sheltering all the remaining seniors.
- Means somebody else will have to be screamed at by the manager or the partner.
- Means somebody else will have to spend waking nights at the goddamn office…probably alone.
Being alone in the office means you’re a slave of the famous Hoteling system. To those who’re unfamiliar with this system, it is basically a concept of sharing and saving office space. As a big 4 employee, you don’t get a desk in your office, unless you’re a manager or a partner. Instead, you call the “hotel administrator” and tell them you’re gonna be in office on a particular day and the dude will check the computer and allot you a table for the day. You don’t get to choose.
The system is apparently supposed to save costs and reduce staff (why I haven’t seen a proportionate and compensating increase in pay I don’t know). And guess where it all started – apparently in the Chicago offices of Ernst & Young – why am I not surprised? Big 4 lead the way in enslaving the corporate world.
Anyway, for every “innovative” cost-cutting measure, there is an even more innovative way of getting around it. In my office at least, disgruntled seniors do not like to check into the “hotel”. It’s lame and you don’t get the place you want. You also have to keep moving from table to table or worse, from floor to floor.
The most prime piece of real-estate inside the firm for the seniors are those overlooking the river. There are not many of those, simply because the building is built at a pathetic angle and of course, the partners have already occupied the clear views. The first years and second years are ignorant of these slots so too bad for them.
The seniors love to jostle for these prime spots. Some have resorted to leaving their laptops overnight at the same spot and spilling coffee nearby for a “dramatic effect” to make it appear ultra dirty, thereby making others disgusted enough to steer away. Some come in ULTRA-early (also the same losers who go to the corporate gym in the morning to hog the 2 miserable treadmills available for the firm employees) to book their desks. My senior takes the cake. One day, he sat down on the seat next to the window overlooking the river. Thereafter, he proceeded to take out his sleeping bag and stretch it over the chair. Then came out the baby photos and the pillow…and the lamp…and the fan…and probably half his apartment. You would think he had been chased out of this apartment by his wife or something.
Anyway, that’s not the most shocking thing.
My partner, whose office is near that coveted spot, came over to my senior and said,
BN, I’m glad you’re taking a proactive approach to getting things done around here. You’re exemplifying efficiency at its best! Keep up the good work!
Right. Bloodsuckers. I rest my case.
I can’t stand name-droppers. People who seemingly unpretentiously drop names of famous people in their conversations. Oh they’re pretentious all right. And so very deliberate in their name dropping.
I don’t get why people name-drop. Does it boost their egos in any way? Do they think that others will think better of them or that it impresses chicks?
Newsflash: Chicks don’t dig name-droppers. At least auditors don’t.
Case-in-point. My horny bastard client casually name-dropped Sarah Palin:
I’m really glad that Sarah Palin quit as Governor of Alaska and is aiming high. I would love to see her run for president. You know, just the other day my sister’s friend’s brother-in-law’s nanny who used to work for Sarah says she’s such a gem.
Oooooh, so I see we’re going on first names now huh.
Guess what? My brother’s ex-girlfriend’s neighbour’s dog used to play with Barney, who’s now the White House Dog. He thinks Barney’s a real chum.
Beat THAT sucker.
Ok I didn’t say that, but I would have LOVED to. Instead I said, oh really, that’s so sweet. Uggh. I’m disgusted with myself.
I hate that we have to be nice to these moronic clients. Horny Bastard did not stare at my boobs for once today. Maybe this granny-like black suit did the trick. Black suits are so boring – and so typical of auditors. Yet, they do come in useful at times like these.
God, I could just strangle some clients…with my bare hands. My hands are pretty small so imagine the pent up frustration that is required to do the job. I always seem to get the dumb and annoying clients. Dumb clients are bad enough. Blood pressure shoots up.
Dumb + Annoying client = Coronary damage for Auditor
This dumb client I have now has no clue about accounting standards. He keeps asking me even basic questions. How do these morons even get the job???
“Is this a post balance sheet adjusting event”? >>> Go read the bloody standard.
“How do we adjust for it?” >>> I am not doing your work for you.
Idiot. Do I look like your ACCOUNTANT??? I’m your friggin AUDITOR. I audit your work. What’s the point of me doing your work for you and thereafter auditing it?
Added to the fact that he is as dumb as a doorknob, he is also friggin annoying. He’s left me 20 messages in my voicemail. The bloody firm gives me a basic minute mobile subsidy, it’s not sufficient to cover even a fraction of his calls to me. And he expects me to respond pronto pronto.
If all these aren’t enough, I also think he is a horny bastard. I’ve caught him staring at my boobs not once, not twice but THRICE already….and that’s today alone. I do not attribute it to the push up bra I was wearing (I was gonna meet Axl for a nice dinner after work so naturally I was dressed up) cos he’s done so on other days when I was wearing turtlenecks too. But he does it soooo discreetly and his eyes shift soooo fast, it’s difficult to ascertain for sure.
AAAARRGGHHH.
Ok it seems my poor punk 1st year assoc. is in a bit of a rut. His manager spoke to him again today. In particular, it seems, she went through his appraisals for his first two engagements.
The poor boy was dumbfounded, given that all he had to do for those two short engagements was to vouch and tick – two things newbie associates are destined for. They’re either banished to the depths of a store filled with hundreds of invoices to vouch or given countless schedules to imprint lovely tick marks on.
Vouch and tick, vouch and tick, vouch and tick – does it get any more idiot-proof than this – NO. That’s the most clueless and brainless thing you can ask a person to do. And how exactly you can get appraised on that is beyond comprehension.
Let’s see some of the review points the poor boy got from his senior/manager:
- Pls use the green tick for all totals. You have used the blue one unnecessarily
- What did you vouch to?
- Pls use the firm’s official tickmarks. “insert strange tick mark” is not known to us
Seriously?
Goals for the audit newbie:
Tick and vouch as well as you can….cos that is the only thing you’ll ever do….and you WILL be judged!
Apparently the hullabaloo regarding imminent layoffs and the impending gloom hanging over more pay cuts is not letting up. Seriously? Could it get worse than this? The firm must be getting a kick out of playing all this up. Somebody out there must be having real fun. I suspect it’s the white haired dude on the 16th floor (which could be any partner).
One of my associates (the punk) blurted out today that he’s really scared he’s gonna get the axe cos’ apparently his manager talked to him about his performance and that he’s “under surveillance”. I don’t even know what that means. Sounds like some patrol officer thingy.
So I was comforting him, telling him it’s probably nothing, she just wants to scare you off yada yada yada. Don’t know if he bought it.
Things like these just make me appreciate some things I have but at the same time I don’t take them for granted. I’m not talking about my job. To heck with it.
I’ve been thinking. At least I have love at this point. If I lose everything including my job, at least I will have love. So I called Axl and made up with him. We hadn’t exactly fought big time, but we had not ended things on a good note the last time we had spoken. Which was on the phone with me and whenever I’m on the phone at work, things rarely go well for the person at the end of the line. It’s like my angriness escalates or multiplies by the second on the phone.
So anyway, we’re good now. I think.
Audit makes me shop. Specifically, it drives me to spend. The weekend is here and to cap off a crap week (dealing with the mad client, the mad PP and every other mad thing about audit), I just HAD to shop.
CC does not need to be dragged to my shopping trips. 3 years on, we think along the same mental wavelength. Audit has strengthened our bond, made us less trusting of sharks around us and of course, made us into incorrigible shopaholics. I bitch about the bloodsuckers in my life daily to her. She does the same. So we both know when we NEED to shop. It is like getting my period. We usually get it around the same time.
So, we went to our favorite mall and I got…let’s see…
- Dresses, can never have enough. I can’t be seen in the same clubbing outfit twice can I?
- Work tops. Bloody first years make snide comments about the seniors’ outfits. Need to keep their tongues at bay.
- Work skirts. I like love skirts. Even if they’re for work.
- SHOES. ‘Nuff said.
My prime buy from Aldo…Loves it. 🙂
OK so you know how I recounted the pub was somewhat empty yesterday, devoid of its usual crowd of pseudo investment bankers?
Cos their banks are not bloodsuckers like our firm. We had to work yesterday. Why am I not surprised? In fact I am surprised only today.
Happy July 4th ya’ll!
Some gibberish: 82semjby76
My current team was loser-ish up to the point PP left. The associate I replaced her with is this punk straight out of college. Full of energy and a motor-mouth to boot. He talks non-stop but is quite entertaining. Thanks to him, the other two quiet-as-mice girls in my team opened up.
He is quite the flirt so I think one of the girls has already taken to him. Tsk Tsk.
Anyway, I’ve come to realise that I often come off as a fierce tyrant at work and that I have a less-than-pleasant disposition. This team has worked hard so far and I sought out to make them feel at ease with me and soften my stance towards them somewhat.
Didn’t know if it’ll work so I told them let’s go out for some beers at the local pub across the building. Now, this pub is usually teeming with pseudo investment bankers but today it seemed they’d already receded to their alter homes or hankered after another waterhole. Which worked for us.
So it turned out really good. The girls really loosened up and the punk definitely worked his magic on one of the girls, or probably both, if I didn’t know any better.
I don’t usually like to chug down beer but I know boys like this punk are most at ease at a pub chugging beer so I got all of them beers and aha, I scooped up some juicy gossip among the first years as well. Whoa, this people are fast. Seems there are already two couples amidst the first year associates. Talk about fast movers!
Audit makes it difficult to maintain a healthy relationship. Add to that my bizarre temperament, I end up with only dysfunctional ones.
I’ve been with Axl for about 3 months now. In the beginning, it was easy and nice. Audit was in the low season so I was knocking off work promptly daily around 6pm. I could go on nice dates with him, including long walks on the beach and entertain his daily phone calls.
Lately, it’s not so nice. On top of that, the nice honeymoon flavor has somewhat wafted away. My experience with men is that the daily phone calls slowly dwindle to weekly phone calls or sometimes fortnightly calls as the relationship progresses. Not with Axl. The daily phone calls used to be nightly and now they’ve progressed to twice or thrice a day.
Like I have so much to say to him? Like no…. unless he wants to listen to me bitch about work, which he clearly won’t understand so I don’t bother.
Added to that, it’s really crazy at work now. Client’s undergoing some kind of bizarre takeover and the accounting is all screwed up. I spend half my time knee deep in research and the other half running around with my boss in heated discussions.
I don’t have the time or energy to entertain Axl. But he is a bloody friggin network engineer (whatever that means I have no clue) with TOO much time on his hands. He calls me every now and then, at work, no less, and I have to abruptly cancel the calls saying yelling I have to go NOW NOW NOW.
I don’t know what to do about this. It’s too premature to break it off and definitely not fair to him but it’s so exhausting!
Aha, managed to put PP in her rightful place – a bottomless pit where she soooooo belongs. I tried to endure her for three days so far and I was pretty much READY to throw in the towel. Then I thought, I can’t possibly let my boss think I’m some incompetent idiot who can’t even handle an useless associate.
So I concoted a plan to offload her. I told my boss that the client is grumbling about out-of-pocket expenses, which is true and I suggested that we get associates who live primarily near to the client’s place. I told her PP was a rich bitch (in not so many colorful words) and that her home in the city center raked up huge cab fares. My boss agreed, esp since she is scared of the client, and replaced PP with another harmless associate.
Phew! That was a relief.
Just I was leaving my boss’ table, I saw her smiling to herself. I hope she doesn’t suspect that I went out of my way to offload PP.
Or maybe I’m just being paranoid. She could be smiling about a MILLION other things. Oh well.
Audit Senior meets Audit Associate 