So, a close friend in Canada, who happens to be an accountant, just emailed me this priceless incident. Don’t be thrown off by the first line…it just goes to show that accountants are on the front lines, battle daily with demons we can barely imagine, and put their lives on the line for society…
"Speaking of interesting auditing stories -
my friend was counting inventory in a deep freeze storage location. These were his parting words…“Because of my job, I will not be able to procreate due to the temperature my boys experienced yesterday.”
You’d be surprised. Some of the auditors at the company I work for once had to oversee the eviction of a landlord from a pub. He’d basically run the place down and moved his junkie mates in; this poor lad or lass had to be provided with bodyguards to make sure the landlord didn’t try to take any stock or fittings with him when he and his mates were forcibly ejected.
Mind you, my firm was also targeted last week by animal right activists (apparently we audited, until recently, a testing company). Lots of abusive calls, emails and physical harassment outside the London office I work at. Not nice.
I did a quality audit at a plant last week that actually had giant vats of bubbling hydrochloric and sulphuric acid. Really - huge, crud-encrusted vats of steaming, bubbling acid, proudly labelled “WARNING!!! ACID!!!” It was right out of a comic book.
adara, would your Canadian accountant’s friend be grossly disappointed to learn that cold is not the great Spermicide?
it’s heat that makes the little guys less functional.
(or maybe he’s just worried that the equipment is never going to make a public appearance again, having withdrawn into the warm safety of the abdominal cavity? eh. they’ll get over it. eventually.)
Heh, I made a comment like that when I worked at IT at Merrill Lynch. I said (after coming back from the server room) that I hope all that radiation didn’t sterilize me…My friend said, I should be used to it since I’m japanese…
They threatened our NYC office too, but I didn’t encounter anyone. I understand we won’t be doing further business with that client (which you alluded to).