Thursday, July 26, 2012

Brain drain

When the boss shows up at your door asking, "Do you have a minute?" there is a tendency for the heart rate to skyrocket for a second as your recent work life flashes before your eyes. Did I forget to do something? Did I draw the wrong conclusions from the data?

Three times in the last two weeks my boss (really a decent guy and pretty good supervisor) has shown up in my doorway with that question. Three times, the question turned out to be related to duties I relinquished almost three years ago, when my position changed from accounting manager to tax.

In all three cases, the person now performing the work should have been able to answer the question (I trained them well, I thought). Today's question could not only have been answered by a first year accounting student, but by any math student who has learned to calculate present value.

I'm flattered, but honestly, people, I need my brain to think about my own work; I've no neural pathways to spare for yours.

It is audit season, which explains a lot of the strange questions. They camp out in our conference room, hunched over their laptops (all of our workpapers are now provided electronically, thank heaven) for almost three weeks, while we jump to answer any queries they put to us. We have a long record of squeaky clean audits; the expectation is it will remain unblemished.

Now...back to my own work.

1 comment:

melissa said...

I can imagine, but it's probably a compliment that he comes to you, right?

But still...the brain can really only hold so much.

Enjoy the afternoon, sweet thing. :)