Nap Much Needed
I had such a tiring, stressful, exciting, fun week that I had to take a nap this afternoon to recover. I never ever nap but I was falling asleep watching the Little League World Series so I just had to lie down. And I slept for FOUR hours!
Now I'm watching Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers in HD on TNTHD. It's amazing! Oh, dear. Haldir just died at Helm's Deep. So sad.
Fifteen Years of Fun
Fifteen years ago Monday I arrived at San Francisco International Airport for the start of a volunteer year with an environmental non-profit organization. Eight months later my boss offered me a full-time job as Office Manager and Bookkeeper. Yesterday, my co-workers threw me surprise party celebrating those fifteen years of service. Yes, I am still working for the same organization but for a little bit more money than my volunteer stipend of $45/month!
I was told of a special all-staff meeting at 12:30pm on Thursday so suspected it might be something me-related but I couldn't be sure. Our ED's birthday is today so there was also a lot of furtive movement about the office related to surprising her with flowers and such. However, she was the one who had entered the meeting into our office calendaring system so I remained suspicious. However, I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about it as I had the audit to contend with!
I arrived in the conference room and there were two pies sitting with a pile of plates as well as several bars of various flavors of chocolate. My boss came over beside me and announced that we were there to celebrate my fifteen years. I was a bit overcome and really can't remember what he said but I was presented with a heavy package wrapped in thick gold paper and bound with binder twine accompanied by a lovely, clever, entertaining note from our founder (who is leaving us after 25 years in December) which I attempted to read aloud through my tears.
The package contained three books: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (what would happen to the earth without humans) and two baseball-related ones. I look forward to reading all of them. Our founder also presented me with some amazing note cards constructed with photos taken by her partner. They are truly beautiful and I can't imagine sending them off to anyone. I'll have to keep them for myself.
Our ED was celebrated with a bouquet of organic flowers, we sang Happy Birthday, then we passed around the strawberry-rhubarb and banana cream pies and chocolate with almonds and caramel as several of my long-time co-workers shared stories about me. It was very lovely; I just wished someone had remembered to provide tissues.
Audit Week
So this week has been Audit Week for me and I had been a little worried after our pre-audit meeting last Monday. It turns out it was for no good reason.
The fieldwork is done and it felt easier than last year. I think all the notes they took last year helped since they hardly bothered me at all. They were happily working up in the library for three days and only rarely ventured down to my office. And the senior auditor was here for barely half a day and spent about 5 minutes talking to me. Last year she called me after the fieldwork and had lots of suggestions for how we could be doing things better. I'm curious to hear what she says this year after reviewing the work the others did this week.
Each year I take lots of notes of what they ask for and I encourage them to let me know if they want me to be doing anything different in preparing my work papers. I think reviewing those notes from last year really helped me this time.
Too many women work on this floor.
One stall in the bathroom isn't enough.
Whenever I checked someone was in there.
My bladder is complaining.
So am I.
I sent my files over to the auditors today at 4pm and felt such a great sense of accomplishment that I decided to leave the office early.
On my way home I remembered some potential bad news that came up during the pre-audit meeting yesterday with the Audit Committee (me, my boss, his boss, the auditors, a Board member and an outside advisor/former Board member). The audit will have some different procedures this year. Instead of testing many areas lightly, they will test fewer areas more heavily.
I'm a bit aprehensive about it since I don't really know what to expect. I fear I will get into trouble for not being careful enough. My boss and I tend to let things slide a bit too much because we trust each other and the rest of the staff and don't always insist enough on proper approvals and documentation.
A big part of what the auditors will be looking for is proper internal controls. I think we've been improving in the area of having more people involved in approval processes and oversight but it might not be good enough and we might have to get written up for it. I sure hope not!
I was scanning my books through the self-checkout machine this morning when I heard the following phrase projected throughout the circulation desk area:
"Do you want to take this outside?"
"I get off at 5," mumbled the check-out clerk.
"You are always rude to me," continued the father, cradling his little girl whom he had plopped upon the counter.
"I get off at 5," repeated the clerk, glad he had a counter between himself and the irate dad.
"Who is the idiot who hired you? Who is the idiot who hired you? Who is the idiot who hired you?" (I swear, he said it three times!)
I had jury duty today and the nice thing is that I can check the courthouse website the evening before to see if I have to actually report the next morning. Lucky me, I didn't have to.
The bad thing is that there's an afternoon session as well so I had to wait until 11am to see if I'd have to go in. So I did a little work at home in the a.m. then checked the website at 10:50 and they already had updated the page to say no one was needed for the afternoon either. Lucky me again!
I showered and headed out for work. I checked the closest BART station for parking spots but there were none so I went my usual station figuring I could park in a nearby lot and walk in if there weren't any places in the BART lots. I checked a couple of the closest lots anyway just in case. And lucky me, there was a spot just waiting for me!
I made it to work before 1:30 and worked until about 7:30. I didn't check the BART schedule to see when the next train was and at that time of night I could be waiting 20 minutes if I just miss one. I got down to the platform and a train was sitting there waiting with the doors closed. A minute or so later, the doors opened again. Now if you think I'm going to tell you that was my train, you'd be wrong. But the next one, a couple minutes later, was. So it was the perfect end to my lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky day.
August is audit month at work. It's my big annual test to see if I'm doing my job properly. It's always a stressful time and I get on people's nerves by asking them for lots of papers.
This year my auditors requested that they do the fieldwork a week earlier than normal because they had another job the week of the 20th. I said okay even though I was already going to be a bit behind from doing production on the magazine. I knew I didn't have any other layout jobs after that so I could concentrate fully on prepping for the audit. This week has been crazy trying to get all the schedules done to send over to their office next week before they get here. I think I could've done it but today I got some good news.
The senior auditor told me that one of the two junior auditors who normally work on our audit is leaving their company and the other one is on vacation the week we had scheduled. So she wanted to push it back a week! I was so happy. I now have all next week to finish things up. Yea!
The elevator here at the office has been out for repairs since Wednesday. We've all had to climb the four or five flights of stairs to get to work. I was happy I planned ahead and brought lunch so I didn't have to go out in search of food.
The stairs are pretty awful though. The treads are made of concrete which is broken in a lot of places. So you're walking along and it feels like you might fall through at any moment. I know it's just lying on top of metal but still.
And the lighting in the stairs is haphazard. Some fixtures are really bright and others are non-existent. One morning I forgot to exchange my sunglasses for my regular ones and I was stumbling around in the dark. You'd think if the building managers force us to take the stairs, they would at least put in light bulbs!
