Where have you been?

So, I don't know if you have noticed, but there is this *tongue in cheek* slight inconvenience in the world and South Africa at the moment that is called "an economic crisis".

People reactions to this are amazing... One person said -"It won't affect South Africa" and 100 000 to 300 000 people lost jobs in SOUTH AFRICA...

At my company we are not getting increases this year in order to save costs so we can all preserve our jobs - if we don't do this, it is predicted that before the year is out, 6 000 of us will have lost our jobs - accounting for one fifth of our workforce.

So, the Group CEO flew down from Joburg to address the management in the Durban area today and explain everything to us. He gave a brilliant, simple presentation, backed up with evidence, explained the plan in the pipelines, the strategy, the problems, the solutions, the focus - everything necessary for management to understand what is going on.

I was proud to know that the person at the helm was thinking strategically, that the plan made sense, that jobs were being preserved, that the interests of the country were being taken into account. At the end, the forum was opened up to questions from the floor.

The thing that was most interesting for me at this time was how clear it was that some people just can't understand the economic crisis. To them, it is not happening. Even after being presented with hard facts. So for them, the decisions being taken are incomprehensible and totally negative. For all of our good, I hope they do start to understand or at least follow the strategy presented otherwise jobs will be lost. No matter how good the leader is at the helm, if the rest of the team don't work towards the same goal, the ship will be lost...

I thank God that at the moment I have my job, income, a place to stay and food on the table. The more I watch and read the more I don't take them for granted.

The Wii

Andrew and I have purchased a Wii with some hard earned cash and some Wedding Giftmoney... We are enjoying coming home and spending some time - us against the computer!

Wii Sports has proved to be a lot more fun than we anticipated - with the training sections helping us to improve -especially with Baseball - which seemed totally useless at first - it is still pretty annoying, but once you improve it does have some promise.

My favourite game is Mario Kart so far where I've managed to unlock some of the Cups and new Courses...

We are in the middle of Year End at work at the moment so it is providing some welcome distraction when I come home from work.

At the moment I'm typing this block, half watching Andrew playing baseball and hearing all his sound effects as he enjoys his game...

One or two of our friends have Wii's so we are looking forward to swapping games with them when we get bored of ours.

Year End is going fairly well at the moment - some careful prep from our side and the side of the Auditors is hopefully going to pay off some dividends with limited overtime. I'm almost excited, but am trying not to be, cos it takes with one thing to turn everything into a nightmare. Yesterday I was plotting my exit from the office at 4.10pm (I'm supposed to finish work at 4pm - govt Dept :) :) but that doesn't exactly always happen. At 4.11pm, one of my colleagues came out of a meeting with the Auditors and suddenly we had a whole lot of info to gather for them - I left work at about 5pm and then today at 6.20pm - amazing the impact of 1min...

Anyway... off to join Andrew in his endeavours to beat the Wii at the Tennis Game...

The Meeting of the Month...

Today I went to a meeting that will stick in my mind for the next while. The meeting was supposed to be to train the Business Process Owners at the company I work for. I am the Finance Business Process Owner - a Business Process Owner is basically the person that is responsible for the day-to-day running of the process (manual and IT related) and also the projects that are running that affect our particular process.

Business Process Owners are therefore the management of the company (below the exco level) and therefore generally people who are used to pretty much getting their own way, making their own decisions, using their own initiative, running things and changing things...

Now - put all these people in the same room, give them one goal, presented by someone on the same level as them and what outcome do you get??

Seriously, give it some thought... these people are used to giving instructions...

What you get is heated discussion, disagreement and any number of solutions to the "problem"... anything, but acceptance of the solution. My favourite part is the people who arrived late had the most to say and caused the most damage... It doesn't sound bad when you read this post, but I am not going to bore you with the details.

What I learnt from this is :

The meetings I used to think were bad, are not bad compared to this...

I will never call a meeting of the BPO's...

I will never call a meeting of the BPO's unless the CFO is there to back me up...

If I have to chair a meeting of the BPO's I will have strict rules that ONE person talks at a time and they do not talk while being interrupted... I'd use the "conch" idea...

Man, the meeting was so bad that I, as the youngest person there, had to suggest a "comfort break" so that people would have time to cool down... Then suggest a way that everyone can have their say in a non-highly-assertive manner... what a meeting... what a meeting...

I now wonder how much longer I will last in my current position? The stress levels are not sustainable... Anyway, that is a thought for another day, I'm there to give as much as I can, and learn as much as I can, in the best way possible and somehow in the midst of that be a shining light for God... And boy do I have much to learn on that last point!!

So you want to be a CA?

...but what do you know about being a CA?

Well... they earn lots of money, they are generally considered to be professional, people listen to them (um...cos the CA is usually the boss so they have to!),their opinion is generally sought after, they have influence and they sort out stuff...

So...let me share with you another day in the life of this CA...

I started the day at 5am with my alarm going off telling me to go to gym. I was pretty gracious about this matter and went off for my exercise (I've decided to go on Tues, Thurs and once on the weekend).

After some breakfast and a shower I proceeded to work to start knocking off my "To Do" list that was 20 points long...

During the course of the day I:- (CA's like putting things in point form)
1. I explained to the Tax Manager how to do a Finance month end (we have to learn each other's jobs)
2. logged a call to the Photocopier people as ours was jamming.
3. checked someone's leave record to ensure all was as it should be
4. dealt with the internal auditor being upset with the management accountant and vice versa
5. checked some journals that we had to send to the terminals
6. created a journal
7. posted a journal
8. played the "communicator" and linked people up so they could get the info they required
9. sent out a communication to all the terminals
10. approved a change for the IT system
11. requested a change for the IT system
12. corrected data on the IT system
13. got someone in trouble that wasn't doing their job properly
14. reminded people of work that was outstanding
15. dealt with a difficult person who was irrate and not showing respect to staff in our Finance section
16. and then proceeded to escalate where the difficult person had messed up to someone who also cared (don't mess with a CA, they have influence and have no patience with rude people)
17. authorised foreign payments and local payments
18. answered the phone
19. listened to people's problems that visited my desk
20. got my leave form signed for a half day off on the 13th Feb so we can go away for Valentine's weekend :) :) :)
21. answered the assistant's telephone (he is also a CA, so you can imagine the calls)
22. supervised the staff
23. updated my "to do" list that is now 30 items long and re-scheduled "due by" dates for all the tasks I didn't do today...
24. etc etc etc...

okay, okay, I realise you are bored now... but I didn't force you to read this...

So basically, I left work an hour later than our finishing time, exhausted, made supper and now am blogging.

Tomorrow it should be the same sort of thing (ie. the day's tasks are all going to be unique) but no gym. After work, we'll proceed to my parents to say goodbye to them before they go away to visit my brother and sis-in-law and then go to friends for dinner, Thursday there are more activities after work, Friday a prayer-meeting after work, Saturday a lunch time braai about an hours drive away, Sunday is early morning church... and then Monday comes and it is month end at work...

Phew... so you want to be a CA? - Well if you can figure out how to juggle a stressful day at work, exercise, a new marriage, devotional time, sleep, time with two families, time with friends, church and church activities, grocery shopping and all the normal household tasks then please let me know. My life as a CA is certainly not unique, You either keep up, or bail out... The point of being a CA is that you have demonstrated that you can think, and problem solve - therefore you spend the day problem solving - which is exhausting...

In spite of this all, I do in fact love my job. I just wish the "to do" list was 5 long instead of 30 and I had double the energy. I'm learning a stack of stuff everyday and learning to be assertive and deal with difficult people.

A day in life of Debbie at work

Yesterday I was off work, sick with a stomach bug. I thought it would have been fairly quiet at work, but instead I was greeted with 41 e-mails on my return, about 35 of which were actionable e-mails. Whilst trying to wade through these e-mails, the 41 e-mails of the current day were also arriving... shew... by the end of the day I was exhausted trying to keep up with everyone's demands. None of these were what I would term "my work". Oh, they were my work in the sense that I had to deal with them as they are my responsibility or the responsibility of my co-workers who are on leave, but they were not the tasks I had planned for the day or the things that I wanted to do that would actually add some value.

The tasks were, amongst others :- creating cash accounts on the system, changing general ledger configuration, assisting someone with preventing segregation of duties issues, unblocking accounts, following up on payments, authorising payments, confirming vendor details, arranging training details, assisting in putting together an advert to advertise a vacant position, giving internal audit their information so they could audit, changing customer details, visiting HR, filling in audit requests for the auditors of our customers, giving trade references, reading information supplied by HR...

And that is what I call "ADMIN".

So, now you know... a CA does not just play around with numbers all day!! If only we did!!!

The tasks that I would have prefered to have done today would be to test some new reports in our Quality Assurance Environment, complete one or two of my Standard Operating Procedures that I was drafting and meet with staff to begin implementing them.

But tomorrow is another day...