The Project from Hell

Unexpected phone call from the CFO.  Nice guy.  Tasked with the Project from Hell.  An Audit of one of our divisions in another state.  All of the auditors are brand spanking new, they know nothing about our industry or what we do.  Assigns a portion of it to me with a 48 hour deadline.

Office door closed.  Hunkered down, staring at my screens for 2 solid days, going cross-eyed from the Excel spreadsheets with only the color-coding of highlighted rows and columns to keep me from going completely crazy.  Searching for files in our system, opening related pdf docs, then running OCR text recognition to be able to mark up some of them.   Save As to a network folder so another can review the items and call with questions.  Endless email strings to get answers to questions that matter only to auditors.

Coworkers with a great sense of humor.  Large sign appears on my door:  DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT KNOCKING ON MY DOOR – ESPECIALLY IF YOU ARE JUST HERE TO WHINE ABOUT SOMETHING.   Allison understands.   Laughter for others.   Nice.

Compassion for the CFO.  Irritation with the unknown auditors who are just doing their jobs.  Frustration with internal staff whose errors cause hours of managerial time to explain or ask forgiveness for.  Desire to feel traction with the project.  Desire to be done with the project.

Day 4.  One last round of questions looking for new, different answers that don’t exist.   Big, heavy, audible sigh.   Talk to the boss for ideas and encouragement.  Take a break to have a meeting.  Unexpected wonderful outcome to the meeting.  Return to office to tackle audit tasks to find the requests have been rescinded.  I have unintentionally invoked and benefited from Dr. Kinneavy’s rule:  if you wait long enough the deadline will pass.

It was going to be okay all along, I just couldn't see it.  Big smile.  Happy face.  Life is good again.  Thank you God.