It’s official, I hate auditors

Just as I was sitting there thinking why the hell was I doing this job (when you start to analyse peoples pictures on their desk, the probability of people turning left or right when you approach them in the corridor (so you can avoid bumping into them and their cup of coffee), the peak times for going to lunch (Always going five minutes before the hour as people always leave then) , the chance of being left with Coriander and lime and other green like looking things in a piece of bread that nobody ever buys but they still persist with every day sandwich, the chances of reaching the toilet only to be confronted with a ‘Closed – Female cleaner in attendance’ but then walking past the ladies toilet and reading a ‘closed – male cleaner in an attendance’ (why don’t they just clean their own sex toilets and save me the trip?) and the game of roulette every time I go to purchase the Coriander and lime and other green like looking things in a piece of bread that nobody ever buys but they still persist with every day sandwich, packet of Prawn Cocktail Walkers crisps with toffee crisp and copy of the Times with my haven’t got a clue how much credit is on my staff pass) I came up with another series of thoughts. Apart from using more commas and not fifteen sentence paragraphs, there really must be worse jobs than mine. And then came salvation. The auditors were in.

There is something about being an auditor that just doesn’t sit right with me. They get paid, quite a lot, to go into departments and basically, and rather proudly, rip the shit out of your work. It’s quite simple. An afternoon with the auditors is like an afternoon with your grand mothers best friend who can’t hear because, well she is ninety and deaf, giving you the Spanish inquisition. Well maybe not. After all, you get a nice cup of hot tea with your grandmother, she only asks you “So have you met any nice young ladies recently” or “How is work?” or “You have grown”, all of which you can answer with the same question, because as well as her fading hearing, she has fading memory.

So they ask lots of questions about your work. “But what happens if…..” or “What’s to stop someone accessing this work that shouldn’t be?” or the classic, and forever used, “So, if you got run over by a bus, how would we know what you have been doing?”. I would like to think that if I did get run over by a bus, a priority would be contacting my next of kin, arranging flowers, making sure my laundry got done, selling my laptop and donating the proceeds to the CancerAid collectors I keep on avoiding in the street, rather than looking for documentation I may, or may not have produced for the system I designed.

They take notes. Lots of notes. As you try to explain how the process work they give you that look. That look a mechanic gives you when you take your smoking car in for a service. You expect them to get out their big fat red marker pen out and write all over your screen with the words “Could do better”. But before I went too excessive I remembered, I know an auditor. Just because they have a job that makes them hated, they can be alright. They don’t check your washing process for signs of weakness, they don’t stand back and criticise your reverse park in real life, they don’t suggest workarounds if you are off sick in bed and can’t make that early morning cup of tea.

Then I thought. Fuck. I need to go on another six month holiday again in the sun.