Racing Turtles

Am accounting professor now and subjecting unsuspecting students to accounting (well, they signed up, so they should suspect something).

But the other week my department leadership puts a bunch of people in a group together and tells us "do this thing" with no information at all about what we are doing or how and no one on the team had been on one of these teams before. So after the initial meeting where we realize no one knows what's going on, I started digging around and found old notes and information and was like "hey, I think we are supposed to have done this and here's how the reports are supposed to look, and I even updated the excel so that it has a built in If/Then logic test to see if our assessments meet the required pass rate and you don't have to manually enter that" and one of the business profs was like "how did you manage all this? You are really holding us together" or something and I was just like "well... I'm an accountant. I'm used to figuring out what the heck is going on with less than a quarter of the information I need and a piece of bubblegum."

If you like solving mysteries, sudoku, logic puzzles, and when numbers match, try accounting today.

i managed to work miracles with the many spreadsheets i inherited from my predecessor by adding basic if/then functions and =ROUND (she explained to me when she started that there were a lot of things you "couldn't" do math for in excel because there would be rounding errors :| ). you don't even need lookup to make people think you're a wizard.

i offered to automate something for a coworker in excel and she was very excited even though it was very basic math, because doing math in excel was scary to her. so i threw the spreadsheet together and initially i was going to put in those little pop-up things, where you select a cell and it tells you what you're supposed to enter. but i realized immediately that there was no way she would understand this or even know to look for it. then i was going to make a PDF of instructions but realized immediately that she would never be able to find the PDF because she didn't know how to find any files except through her downloads folder. so then i just made a second sheet in excel, so there was one named 'worksheet' and another named 'notes'. and on the notes sheet there was nothing but a single screenshot of the worksheet that i drew all over to indicate where the numbers were supposed to go. then i added a border and slightly tinted the screenshot so that it would be obvious that it was an image.

anyway when she called me over to her desk because the spreadsheet was broken, she was on the notes page dragging the screenshot in frantic circles trying to figure out how to enter her data into the sepia-toned image.

I studied accounting but ended up in Internal Audit, accounting's less popular sibling, and SO MUCH of it involves trying to get sensible evidence documents from people. The other week I asked for a list of expenses for a project, and got back an out-of-focus photo of a single sheet of paper with a few half-visible numbers. They hadn't even bothered to make the paper lie flat.

i feel bad for the auditors because i scapegoat them all the time trying to get the actual paperwork we need. i'm constantly like, "oh man i totally trust you for real and would have no problem doing this stupid fucking thing you're asking that would enable you to do so much embezzling, but you know how we get audited every year, those auditors don't fuck around, if we don't have the paperwork that you know perfectly fucking well we're supposed to have then the auditor will get mad"

but the auditors feel bad for me because the only time they actually need to talk to me is to help them untangle timesheets, when i have to say "well see the typed and printed stuff is what the employee submitted, and then the pale blue ballpoint is where the department head corrected it because their math was wrong (they do not use formulas they just manually figure out their hours), and then the magenta felt-tip pen is where i fixed what the department head fucked up and also found mistakes they missed, and then anything in dark blue rollerball ink is where the head accountant found another mistake that i missed when i submitted everything to be finalized" and then the auditor is like

One time working retail at a remote site an old man got SO angry at me for not giving him veteran tax exemption. I'm like sir that requires internet and this is a football stadium. Now I am IT support for our sales and finance teams in our ERP. And I still deal with stuff that is shockingly similar

my favorite part about the taxation course in college was that the textbook started with an intro that was basically "this is not a class about your opinions on taxes, no one cares about your opinions on taxes, this is literally just a class on the law as it exists and how to comply with it, please do not interrupt class for a screed about taxes because it really isn't relevant and also we know"

Sis I got an admin job at a law firm, and I think it was your blog I got the "google a pivot table" advice from - they keep giving me raises because I...just keep googling tech questions and coming back with Answers That Work. It's insane. All of these people have multiple postgrad degrees and they invent new wojak faces every time I parrot a youtube tutorial at them. A+++ would take job advice from you again

I feel that accounting post so hard. I’m not an accountant but I work in the back office of a credit union and I’ve run into so many similar situations. Like we need a copy of a driver’s license or other form of photo ID for certain transactions/applications. Sometimes people take a photo of it if they don’t have access to a scanner, which is usually fine. I came across one where the person was in their car and holding the driver’s license in front of the steering wheel but the camera was where the driver’s head would be, so it was really tiny. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Like we do actually need to see the text on the license, not just that it exists.

i've had department heads hand me timesheets like "here's duncan's timesheet" and i'm like "who is duncan" and they're like "he's the new guy i hired" and i'm like "i don't know who that is" and they're like "well i hired him" and i'm like "i do not have a single piece of paperwork to tell me who duncan is, what his job is now, what he is paid, how he is paid, or even evidence that he exists" and they're like "he's actually been working for a while now so he needs retroactive pay also" and i'm like "do you understand what a labor law is"

then they call duncan to tell him he needs to come fill out paperwork and he's like "i'm pretty busy this week" and i'm like "we can't pay you" and he's like "you can just make a paper check out to duncan and that's fine" and i'm like "do you understand what a labor law is"

then duncan manages to make time to come in and i'm like "do you have any proof of your identity and also proof that it is legal for us to hire you" and he's like "my bitch ex-wife got those in the divorce, does it work if i show you a picture of an ohio drivers license taken by a potato and texted to me by my teenage son from a canadian number not saved to my contacts" and i am like "work on getting replacements so that we can pay you please"

he then proceeds to fail the mandatory DOT drug test required for CDL holders, which is necessary for the job he was hired for, so his employment is immediately terminated. he still has not produced the documentation i need to pay him. no one ever explains to me how he managed to not have a drivers license if he was hired for a Class A CDL position.

highly recommend temp agencies for job seekers looking for clerical nonsense vs applying directly btw! temp agencies are motivated to negotiate you a higher salary than you might be confident asking for because they make a percentage of it

my mom got a lot of her best jobs through temp agencies when offices decided they wanted to hire her directly for a permanent position, i just always forget about them because we don't have any around here