It's Been A While

Thanks to Span (via 5Live board) and Shy (Pistols post) for asking how I am, hopefully this post will bring things up to date.

There's an episode of X Files where Mulder starts behaving even stranger than normal and Scully eventually tracks the source of his strange behaviour down to the water supply to Mulder's apartment. For the purposes of literary licence you could substitute Mulder's apartment for our office.

You can tell how bad things are when the boss has to call a meeting of his managers. This happened two weeks ago and was only the third time in ten years he has had to do it. Usually the three of us, well two of us really, run things as a sort of autonomous collective, we make the decisions and our boss writes the pay cheques, but we have so much work and so few staff we hit a mental brick wall - hence the need for the meeting. Our year is geared up to making sure all self assessment returns are filed by 31st January in accordance with statutory regulations, strictly speaking there is another 14 days after that date but HMRC would never dream of telling the public because they'd still be waiting in March for some returns. Anyway, at the time of our meeting we still had just over 300 returns to prepare, send to clients and submit online. No problem people thought, we'll do it. That was because certain people had got into their mindset that we had three months to go, when I pointed out that excluding weekends and Christmas we only had 61 working days left the building echoed to the sound of 'Don't Panic Mr Mainwaring, Don't Panic!'

The problem is we simply don't have the staff and the staff aren't out there in great numbers, you can't pick and choose. This is hardly news, I posted about it on here before, and I actually made the point at my last staff appraisal which was on 21st October 2006! Salvation seemed to heading our way in the shape of an Indian Takeaway, the idea was being seriously considered that we outsource our work to an accountants practice in Pune via an office in Croydon. Meetings were arranged, documents scanned and then the concerns that myself and Angela had voiced but which had been, how shall I put this, ignored, were brought up during our six monthly QA compliance visit. The Indian adventure was laid to rest.

We have less than half of the staff we had last year due to leavers, maternity leave and a change in hours of two members of staff. Coupled with that Mary who has just taken her final exams for the second time has just had a mental breakdown on account of being bullied by her female flatmate! Oh the joys of office life.

Anyway as a result of all of this I haven't had the mental energy to switch my computer on during the evening for the past four weeks and post on here. It wasn't for shortage of ideas, I'd already composed posts on Remembrance Day, Martina Hingis, the failure again of our Golden Generation and the missing disks fiasco. I may well post about them at some later date. Even postings on various messageboards have been curtailed by work (shame eh?) although yesterday I found myself with some time on my hands and enjoyed a couple of hours on Gavin's board for the first time in months. That board has been going for almost a year and yesterday passed the 30,000th post which is great. Well done Gavin, brilliant achievement.

Last night I felt as ill as I have done for years, I'm not joking either. I got home just after 5:15, had a bath and then collapsed from mental exhaustion, four months of ten hour days without a proper break had finally taken their toll. It's not just the work it's the responsibility of being a manager, as we've seen this week on a much bigger scale the buck stops somewhere.

There is some light at the end of the tunnel and his name is Brian. Brian is a time barred accountant, that means he failed his final exams twice and couldn't take them a third time within the prescribed period, who starts with us on Monday. He has the perfect CV and apparently was so overjoyed when offered the job he punched the air with all the unconfined joy of a Sri Lankan batsman upon hearing Steve Harmison was opening the bowling. Such is the expectation that Brian will ease the tension in the office that I can't help thinking his arrival has taken on some sort of messianic qualities. Let's hope he is the Messiah and not just a very naughty boy!