You know, it was Facilities who screwed things up, so maybe Facilities should have to fix it, or pay to fix it. And don’t let Shredder Guy know that you have beer. I told my husband about SG and him “borrowing” quarters from someone else’s slot machine bin, and my husband is amazed that SG still has a job.
Hell, I’m surprised he still has an arm!
Is your ass fully covered if something happens? Separation of duties is to protect the company (I believe), but it also works to protect workers. I can just see it; “Well, Dr. Girlfriend is the only one who has access to both, so she must be the guilty one.”
When I was involved with some auditing work, this was the recommended way to do it.
Telling them in advance what you wanted to look at would just give a warning, if there was any crooked stuff going on. And give the crooks time to hide, destroy, or forge documents relating to your inquiry.
Not giving a list in advance did mean a bit of time wasted waiting while the needed documents were retrieved. But worth it, because higher chance of getting real & complete documents. Especially because one of your people went with when they were looking for the documents. And wasted time doesn’t matter much in audits – they are essentially all wasted time anyways. Needed, and important, but contributing nothing to the bottom line.
I can see the point from the auditor’s point of view but from my point of view it was a nightmare. Having to drop everything and hunt up some records on a moment’s notice is not always the easiest thing.
Believe me, this has crossed my mind. I’m very careful to leave an obvious trail of everything I do. Especially because the branch manager is so quick to blame me for anything and everything that goes wrong, even if I wasn’t even in the damn building when it happened. But that’s a tale for another day.
We only get a partial list of things the auditors want. When they show up Monday they’ll have a thousand other things they need. I think they want to get some of the prep work out of the way.
We’ll get a few weeks notice for the big audit. Well, the boss will… I’ll get the list two days out again I’m sure.
Send some good thoughts and hard liquor my way next week, ok?
If it is a true emergancy, I don’t mind frantically tossing boxes around for auditors who just showed up, but that really doesn’t happen in my world. The auditors supply their victims with a list of what is needed well in advance. What happens is that the person who is supposed to look the files up in their system and then tell me where to look forgets. I get “I’m so sorry, Flatlined, but OMG!!! HELP ME!!!” emails all the time. They are my customers as well as coworkers.
Continuing saga of the emergancy boxes. Back when I first got the transfer sheets, one per box, I broke them up into stacks of 20 for the data input. Sometimes my boss will try to help. I try to give her easy stuff to do, so I entrusted her with 20 transfer sheets.
Yesterday, I used up all the labels I had. One label for transfer sheet. There were 20 naked boxes!!! How could that happen? I printed up inventory sheets for each pallet and went back today and checked. All of the labeled boxes where where they were supposed to be. After carefully writing down what was written on every naked box, I drove back to my desk, checked the data base and found that 20 boxes in the computer didn’t have proper homes.
OK, I can fix anything. I can just print out copies of the attached transfer sheets and use them to label the boxes, right? Well, no. They aren’t attached.
So no paperwork, no labels, the computer work was incomplete. Crap, says I. What could I have done with them? I check the audit trail in the hope of figuring out where my mind was when I made that very serious mistake.
As it happened, my mistake was to trust my boss with 20 transfer sheets.
Stupid piece of shit retarded new system can only pull accounting history for the current month and the previous month. Would’ve been nice to know this ahead of time, but TPTB didn’t do their homework before jumping into this conversion. That’s becoming more and more clear by the day.
It’s now November, which means I cannot pull for September. The auditors are here. Guess which month they want histories for? If they had gotten me the rest of their list yesterday it wouldn’t have been a problem. But now I have to spend hours on the phone with tech support trying to piece together the reports the auditors need.
The best auditors I’ve seen didn’t even bring a list, they would do things like open a drawer, pick three documents at random and ask you to trace them, or go up to someone who’d just received an item and ask them to explain what they were doing documentation-wise (what did you check for, is it correct, can you please show me where does the procedure say that). They were the ones who worked with and not against you, and who searched for actual comprehension rather than blind compliance.
That situation one of my clients had, where they would give up to five usernames to the same person and call it “separation of duties” would have sent one of those auditors… well, not into spasms, since none of them were the spasming kind, but they would have been talking very, very slowly and quietly in an effort to keep from throttling the donkeyfuck who’d come up with such as scheme rather than documenting why does it make sense for the manager of a factory to be able to purchase things below a certain amount with no further supervision. Heck, it wasn’t even my department and I had to ball my hands and stick them into my pockets while taking deep breaths.
Doc, if we ever do that exchange previously mentioned, I may be able to do something to whomever thought it was good to have an accounting system which can’t pull things for at least the last five full calendar years (that is, not just the last 365*5 days, but from January 1st of “current year-5”). You can handle my bank, which only gives me the last 180 days but that suddenly looks great beside what you have - that’s some amazing levels of idiocy!
To whomever decided we need 12 layers of encryption on our work laptops: Fuck you.
I am typing this on my phone because my work laptop is dead. It’s going to take me a good 10 minutes to type but it doesn’t matter cause I have nothing else to do and my thumbs hurt from twiddling so hard. My team has all of 7 people and I am the second to have this happen since the encryption was rolled out 3 months ago. I’m sure my data is safe in there somewhere but I can’t get it since the encryption dll failed!
But I understand, laptops die, shit happens. I should just grab that laptop from the guy who quit after a month because the job was too complicated for him. Oh nevermind that! I can’t because his laptop is encrypted too and it can’t be used until it’s wiped completely clean! Which tech support hasn’t done either!
Oh well back to thumb twiddling.
Boss sent out a reminder email that I need to do something and put on it the person who needs to/should give me the info. She calls me to ask what it’s about, I explain and she says she’ll pass me to Clerk Guy. Clerk Guy has nothing to do with this beyond he does a step before it comes up front! You can’t just take a few steps, reach in the filing cabinet, pull out a piece of paper (which would be the last in the folder) and email it to me? Seriously? If it’s that much trouble call the CSA across the cube farm and ask her to do it, but Clerk Guy probably has less idea than you about where it is since he works out back and you work up front.
I just gotta say I really do appreciate the sympathy and support I get from you guys on here! Especially because venting to my boyfriend is less than useless. I love the guy, but he’s one of those “oh just think positive and everything will be ok” types. Makes me stabby sometimes.
That being said and this being the Pit, here’s Audit Week rant part II:
Damn email is down today. Not just mine, everyone’s. The pieced-together report I mentioned yesterday? The data processor people are emailing it to me. And the one person in this building who is even slightly capable of fixing the email just left for the day. We don’t have a dedicated IT person, just the branch manager who ‘sorta’ knows what to do.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get into the chocolate stash before my head explodes.
Dr. Girlfriend, are you working for Alberta Treasury Branch? My bank just had a system conversion two months ago, and every time I go online, I get a message about yet another error that is happening. At this point I’m surprised when anything works, not when it doesn’t.
And a “Screw You!” to my temp agency - I’ve called and left messages for the person that is supposed to be my agent twice now, and not received any call back. I guess I’ll take my business elsewhere.
Maybe your agent is one of those people who prefers email? Not that it would excuse ignoring you, but if (s)he is, then it could explain why you get bumped down the queue.
Dr. G, you can bitch here all you want. It’s why these threads are so everlovin’ popular - everybody’s gotta gripe a bit. Enjoy your chocolate.
snort
My grandboss’s boss just wandered into my suite and asked if any of us had “an adding machine on our desk.”
Two of us opened the calculator function off our Start Menu; the third opened Excel. Technology marches ever forward.
One of my favorite parts of my job is counting up checks, cause I get to use the adding machine! As a kid I was always fascinated by adding machine paper rolls. I used some of my allowance to buy some once when I was maybe 6 or 7. Didn’t have any plan, just liked the super long rolls of paper. Now I like the exciting noise and the simplicity of matching up the totals. I also get to teach teenagers how to use the machines which is also fun.
And I keep a little calculator on my desk – right above the mouse, actually. I can just grab that faster than pulling one up on on my computer. Sometimes I’m a dinosaur, I guess.
Cat Whisperer, I’m in Indiana. But your story makes me wonder if your bank converted to the same shitty system we did. I feel for those employees.
No one bothered to tell me today that the email had been fixed. But the report I was waiting on still wasn’t there when I finally got in… it’s just causing the audit to drag on longer. Sigh.
That sucks Dr Girlfriend. 
Technology is such a pain in the ass at times. It’s awesome and hateful all at once. We no longer have a dedicated tech guy, but when they laid off our dedicated tech guy they hired a consulting agency to do stuff around here… but either they didn’t give them the proper authorities to do things we actually need doing around here (possible) or they keep sending us horribly incompetent tech guys (also possible).
And I’m sorry but if the slightly geeky accountant who decided not to go into computer tech work* can fix it after a bunch of fiddling around… WHY THE HELL CAN’T YOU FIX IT WITH MINIMAL FIDDLING???
What’s even more a pain in the ass is we are often forgotten up here in the wilds of Canada so when things go down, we aren’t told about it until someone goes to use it and we discover error messages galore and complain to tech support who tells us that EVERYONE is down and head office is first in line. You can still work can’t you? And then when they fix it, no one says anything until someone tries again out of desperation and hope!
Wow… that rant has been a bit in coming…
*Me. I decided I didn’t want to be a tech support/computer hardware type person, maybe that was the wrong decision.
The report you were waiting on wasn’t sent because they didn’t think your email worked.
I’m going to be off for a month starting on Tuesday. This has been known for 6 months. This is not a surprise to anyone. I’ll be in contact by phone and email. Nobody will die if boxes don’t get put on shelves. All of a sudden, its OMG, Flatlined are you going to have time to do this, what do we do if that happens. :smack: