Madness In My Method

We were in an all-day audit meeting with our external auditors, in a conference room, with our laptops, going over items on a list that they need since we finally got the FY22 trail balance to them just last week. This would have been a normal thing for some other company whose fiscal calendar year matches a regular Gregorian calendar year that closed Dec 31st. But we are on a state government fiscal calendar year, which closed Aug 31st, which means we are ONLY 6 months late (4.5 months if you consider a normal year-end close might take 1.5 months). Our new CFO is just absolutely amazed into fits of giggles at times, just as each of us were when coming on board within the past 2 years. We've been doing out best, but good grief it's like we've only just hit the first base camp after coming out of the sewers on our trek to the top of Mount Fuji.

All Day

One Conference Room

They at least brought in Panera Bread for us so that we didn't have to leave and could continue working through lunch and still have leftovers for dinner before we finally packed it in to go home yesterday evening.

Last Friday was my official last day with Robert Half as a contractor. I accepted an offer from MHMR to be their Treasury Manager, and I'm more or less breaking even on the pay rate. This is not as great as the position the CFO originally wanted for me, the Senior Director of Accounting, but it still means MHMR will get to keep me around longer, and there's always a chance they might come around in a year or so and re-think the Senior Director position.

I had two days of orientation. I still have work to be completed setting up the new accounting system I created for their Foundations program and a new girl to finish training up to take that over from me. I sat down to meet my staff on Wednesday and learn what they have been doing since I honestly can't tell despite working there for a year now. I also will need to be trained on the systems and processes by my predecessor who will be moving to the finance department. So far, she seems open to giving me the keys of the department, but every time I've needed something out of this department previously, I get a long-winded backstory and explanation rather than someone just taking care of something, and I'm pretty sure her style of training will just be more of the same. I'm going to be BUSY for the next few weeks to be sure.

The good news is that we discussed I won't really be part of the current audit, since I haven't really been part of it up to this point regardless. The auditors are familiar with my predecessor, and quite frankly I don't want my name attached to whatever the auditors might find before I have a chance to get my feet wet.

Wish me luck!

1) Moon Moon is gone! And we already have a new hire to replace him! And this poor guy will be watched like a hawk, because I'll be damned if we're going to have another Moon Moon (although I'm not there to help with his training this week). Supervisor Friend wanted to write down what she said to MM during the exit meeting so she wouldn't forget, and I'm eagerly awaiting the goods.

2) Supervisor Friend was not in a good mental space yesterday to go to dinner and tell me all about it, plus we had a large storm cell blow through just as it was time for everyone to be heading out to dinner, so instead we all headed home to hunker down to avoid potential tornadoes and hail. Maybe today? We'll see.

3) Monday I got my teeth cleaned and briefly saw the podiatrist who has requested a blood test before she can prescribe meds for my toes. They look absolutely dreadful. This paragraph is also hilarious, because there used to be a "Teeth and Feet" place up the road from us, but no, I had two separate appointments with the dentist and the podiatrist in two separate locations, lol.

4) Yesterday's adventure turned out 50/50. The purple took like a charm, but the pink didn't properly take, so it's this weird light pink mixed with buttery blonde, and not in a pretty strawberry blonde kind of way. Yellow and pink really don't mix well and keeps looking quite orange to me in under the bathroom light. We think it's because the roots had to be bleached and toned, and so the hair cuticle was just DONE after that and needed more time to settle down before accepting a new color. So, I will be going back Thurs to have the pink redone.

I showed the picture of what I wanted, which was a cotton candy purple and pink, with the pink on top and the purple on bottom. We went with the light pink, but also went with the wild orchid purple, which turned out much darker than expected, although I'm not really complaining. Considering how dark the purple turned out, for the redo of the pink we'll be going with the fuchsia (seen in both of the color images above) instead, and in theory my hair should turn out more like this.

5) Today is a first-time visit to an orthodontist to see if we can sort my bottom teeth. One of my bottom teeth has pushed back and has been causing uncontrollable tongue movements, sucking on the offending tooth, and chewing on the lip in that spot, and all of these uncontrollable movements are killing my tongue, the tongue and neck muscles, and the lip around that area. It's been driving me bonkers since around last Oct or Nov. After that, I have to go do the blood test for the podiatrist. Then I come home and start working on the stack of receipts I need to get sorted and begin finding all the paperwork I need to do my taxes.

6) Tomorrow will be a first-time appointment with a new PCP, since mine retired. I hope I like him. If not, my mom has scheduled with the #2 person on my list of potentials for next week, and I'll find out what she thinks about him.

Because at this point I have nothing better to talk about.

In accounting, we do reclass entries ALL THE TIME.

"Reclass entries" is simply another way of saying "accounting corrections". For example, say something was coded to debit account 86505 when it should have been a debit to 87505. Your basic typo, right? So to make the correction, you have to reverse the original entry, which means a credit to 86505 (because a credit is the opposite of a debit), and then put the amount in like you did originally, but now to the correct account number, so in this case a debit to 87505.

Simple, right? You made it go to the wrong account, so you reverse it and put into the correct account.

Again, we do these ALL THE TIME. Because humans make errors, changes don't get told to the right people, things happen, so a reclass becomes second-nature in no time flat.

Unless your name is Moon Moon.

So, I'm looking at the month-end checklist, which by the way - it's month-end so there should already be entries uploaded for the JEs that already have backup or that were pre-paid earlier in the month or even earlier in the year. I'm looking at New Girl's entries, and she's already uploaded at least 15 plus a bunch of correcting entries where she's helping me clean up past months' stuff. And I'm looking at Moon Moon's name with nothing recorded on the checklist for any of his entries yet, even though I know he's already uploaded a couple. (Updating the month-end checklist is another one of his "action plan" items.)

I happen to look in the accounting system at the recent entries, and one of them is the P-Card entry, a.k.a. purchase card, where senior employees are issued credit cards they can use for minor purchases. You know - The Company Card that your boss used to pay for that lunch meeting he had the other day or to buy donuts for the office staff every so often. It's up to the p-card holders to code the transactions in the p-card system so that they get charged correctly in the accounting system when it's time to pay the bill. I then get a report and turn that into an entry that charges their departments. Notice that I said "I" do that entry, which means I will show New Girl that entry once we get that report in the next business day or two. So it definitely piqued my interest (and worry) when I saw that Moon Moon had just created a p-card entry, so I clicked on it and opened the spreadsheet backup attached.

In a "message" tab, he had snipped a screen shot of the email Supervisor had sent him which included a $1k transaction that had been incorrectly coded. The email also provided the correct coding so that he could process a simple (for donkeys) reclass entry. Supervisor sent this to Moon Moon to process, because 1)Moon Moon was specifically hired to do this kind of work, 2)she knew New Girl and I were busy with other work, and 3)she's doing exactly as HR has requested and giving him all the rope he needs to make his own noose at this point.

I looked at the data tab, and he had successfully highlighted the correct line, so by some miracle he actually managed to find the transaction in question. He also highlighted it on the already-prepared JE tab, changed the account # to the number provided in the email, and uploaded the entry. Can it be??? Could he have actually done something correctly for once in his career as an accountant?

Did I mention that the already-prepared JE was for the BATCH of p-card transactions that I prepared last month? $13k worth of transactions? No? Oh, I guess I should have mentioned that, because Dipshit M-M obviously didn't seem to catch that, either.

Which means instead of processing a reclass entry on $1k, he re-uploaded the ENTIRE $13k p-card batch a second time and merely changed the account number that the $1k was going to on the second pass.

Snip. Email. Weep for my battered soul.

The contract I started at the tail end of Feb 2020, the oil and gas company that filed bankruptcy around Aug or Sept 2021, has finally relieved me of my accounting duties. Yesterday I spent the day showing the two remaining accountants how I do my daily work. They will be taking over those duties and will text me if they have any questions or need me to log back in for anything. So I'm still contracted with them on an on-call basis, but I am no longer responsible for any workload there.

On one hand I was really loving the overtime, but on the other hand I've been running a bit thin on overall energy.

The new contract with a government grant agency that helps drug abuse folks, mentally ill folks, abuse victims, folks going to jail, families in need, etc., still keeps invoking my name as though doing so will magically cure this department or that department of their sickness. Last Thursday they brought on a new temp-to-hire person to take over the month-end duties I've been working on cleaning up since I came on in October. Once I get her trained up through March's month-end, I'll probably have to start poking my nose in either the A/P department or the Cash Management department to see how they are wonkily doing things and start making headway on cleaning them up as well. The Cash Management department was given until last Friday to get some bank recons together, and I'm curious how well they fared in that task.

We have a Moon Moon that managed to piss me off so badly last week I told my boss I was just going to kill him to save her the time of writing him up to fire him. I was looking for a file to copy/paste from Feb into Mar while training the new girl, and it wasn't there. I verified January's version of that file was where it needed to be. Then I had a Very Strong suspicion and checked the SharePoint Recycle Bin. Not only have 3 of my files from MY folder that he doesn't even touch been deleted, stupid ass Moon Moon managed to systematically delete around 50 other files out of the SharePoint over the course of a few hours the day before.

A little backstory. We're in the process of migrating all of our files from a server drive (I-drive, as we have labelled it) to SharePoint. I hate SharePoint, and I hate this idea of getting rid of the I-drive completely, but that's not my call. This company also has the really bad habit of storing files in People-Named folders. So if you work on an entry one month, you would store the backup in YOUR folder, so I would store mine in a folder called Nicole. This is the worst way you can store official backup files for a company, especially one that's gone through at least 5 staff in a single position over the course of a single year. If you're looking for April 2021's spreadsheet, whose folder do you look in? Maybe Person A prepared the entry and has it stored in their folder and they emailed it as an attachment to Person B who actually uploaded it, but Person B changed the Prepared By name in the file so that when they then attached it in the Accounting Software system it has their name all over it, but when you go to that person's folder you never find it. [Psst - this place is a Mad House of Doing It All Wrong, which is why they have brought me in.] So the Accounting Director wanted me to set up the SharePoint file folder structure with how we were used to it being at other companies, with a Year folder, then Month folders in that, then the Categories of types of accounting entries, then the actual entries and backup within those folders. That way you can go straight to what you're looking for regardless of who worked on it.

So, Moon Moon, because he keeps screwing up the ACTUAL journal entries he was hired to work on, was given the menial task of locating the JEs and backup for entries dated Sept through Feb and copy them out of the old I-drive and into the new SharePoint structure. [This company's fiscal year is Sept-Aug, much like a typical school year, hence why we're starting with Sept and not Jan.] Moon Moon, in his infinite wisdom, set about his task, found a lot of JE spreadsheets and backup files, started ADDING folders into our already set up folder structure within the category folders......and we promptly stopped him from continuing to do that. But then he took all of the files he had put into those folders, copied them outside the folders, and the folders he created and the files in them are still there. Then, we noticed that he was putting ALL of the files into February, regardless of which month they were supposed to be for. So last week he was told to move them into the correct corresponding months.

Did he do that?

Well, according to the Recycle Bin, FUCK NO. Instead of moving or copy/pasting the files, he started deleting them out of the folders that they weren't supposed to be in. AND he was touching MY folders, which in this particular instance, the work I was training New Girl on is always a month behind on the journals. So in Feb, I post January's actual and I post a February accrual based on that actual. So the data backup that I had stored in February's folder, the file that I was specifically looking for, was dated for January instead of February, because that's the raw data that's in it. And rather than move it to January, HE DELETED IT. It's not even a folder he should be touching. He doesn't know what's in there. He has no fucking clue what he's doing. I swear we need to fire him before I lose my shit and start yelling at him and making him cry. Although I'm sure my friend and supervisor would pay extra money to witness something like that.

New Girl is awesome. She knows accounting. She knows her shit. I trust her to completely take over what I've started with the JE cleanup.

She's also keeping me sane at the moment.

I'm both working and not working today and tomorrow.

I have off technically from both contracts and holiday pay coming, but I still have at least 4 hours of work remaining for one contract (I decided to go home early Wed) and a few hours to do for another contract that could technically wait until next week, but I don't really want to put it off.

Then off to the family homestead for afternoons, today to help Mom make the dessert salads, tomorrow for the actual family dinner.

I *think* I might be able to have the weekend off, but I REALLY need to tackle the atrocity that is my bedroom.

I other news, Day 2 on New Contract, during an all-accounting-staff meeting, I totally impressed the CFO and internal auditor who just met me for the first time, and I had a couple people do that thing I see in movies where they come up to me after the meeting and tell me how awesome my presentation was. It was....weird. I just told them about one of the month-end close programs we use at Old Contract, nothing special. CFO texted my supervisor afterwards about hiring me on. She's been trying to hire me on for months now, lol.

At work I have to figure out what random checks that have been deposited are for and code them for the accounting system. Most are easy, some require a little digging, and every so often I get a weird one.

"Good Morning!

I left a $50 check on your desk yesterday from [sender]. Long story short, I accidentally sold him a doghouse that was already sold but not picked up by [purchaser]; by the time we figured it out, the check was already in the mail. ..."

Working accounting for a multi-state oil and gas company, I really wouldn't have expected the sale of a doghouse to ever come within my purview, but there it is!

This also means that particular drilling yard once had a doghouse and yard dog. So precious.

I didn't get the better-paying job. I was told that I was one of their top two candidates, but they went with the other person who has more high-level corporate experience.

I'm pretty crushed, and I keep getting reminded that given the rest of the world's situation I shouldn't be. That doesn't change how I feel.

I'll get over it in a couple days.

So, I still have the accounting consulting job and am now working from home even though our cubicles are easily 6ftx6ft each. The better to limit human contact in general. Even walking past someone in the hall from another department or touching the coffee machine buttons risks cross-contamination, not to mention touching the elevator buttons and door handles in a 40-story building.

Like most people, I'm apprehensive. I have one less weight on my shoulders (interviewing for another job), but again, I'm crushed, so there's a slight hint that my brain would like to go into a depressive tailspin right now, but I'm not one to let my brain do such things.

Yesterday morning (before I got the bad news) I thoroughly enjoyed my morning, sipping coffee by an open window with a nice breeze, listening to the neighbor's kids playing, them doing yard work, the smell of them grilling for lunch, and even their damned rooster was pleasant sounding. I'm hoping this morning will help get me back into a similar headspace. I gotta buckle down and focus on my actual job instead of daydreaming about a no-longer-potential job. I'm missing that coffee/tea machine at work, and being able to actually talk to my coworkers in person rather than slow group chat and/or email, but at least we've got a group chat, and we send little jokes a few times a day and talk about our lunch plans.

Head Count: One roommate working from home in the living room. One roommate on furlough for two weeks, because he took the previous week off due to sinus allergies to be nice and not worry his co-workers, but they aren't trusting him to not still be sick/contagious/whatever, even though he never ran any fever nor coughed during that time and no one else is being furloughed - he's pretty sure they have it in for him. Third roommate is in a small handful of folks volunteering to still go into his place of work since instead of 150 people in the office there's now only 5 of them, and he's worried about our house bandwidth with 3 people working from home. I think he's also worried about being cooped up with all the roommates for so long. Of all of us, he'd probably be the one to go stir crazy first.

I'm already tired of the news about the virus and what's going on with other countries and all of the daily predictions regarding how things are going to go moving forward. Good thing my job takes me back to dealing with debits and credits and even more debits and credits, and a few debits and credits on the side. With a whipped debit and cherry credit on top.