Busy Season Tips

It’s just a shame creativity and individuality are diametrically opposed to being a good corporate employee.

To understand the major accountancy firms’ relationship with ‘work-life balance’ try to imagine the relationship the Yorkshire ripper might have with women’s rights if he joined the WI and then forcibly sodomised its members with a 12 inch dildo bought using his Ann Summers card.

To demonstrate this point, a reader recently supplied me with a series of unsolicited busy season ‘tips’ sent round to all members of staff in his office on how to maintain a healthy work life balance. Ranging from the blinding obvious (‘an absence of fear or insecurity isn't happiness: It's just an absence of fear or insecurity’) to the cripplingly patronising (‘a positive mind makes you more productive’) and from the utterly incomprehensible (‘When you speak with more finality than foundation, people may hear you but they don't listen’) to the mindless cliches (‘Don't let your fears hold you back…Today is the most precious asset you have’), these cringe worthy nuggets of advice were, surprisingly, not the words of Barney the Dinosaur, nor of Paul McKenna. They were, he tells me, ‘the duplicitous oeuvre of a manager who thought nothing of keeping me in the office until 3.30am on consecutive days, having worked through my lunches, to perform work some staggeringly pointless that it never made it anywhere near the final file.’

‘Having to dig out and read through these memos’, the contributor continues, ‘felt like being forced to trawl through the family photo book for that childhood picture of yourself smiling to the camera with your balls tucked between your legs pretending you’re a girl.’ He added that, after forwarding on the offending emails, he deleted them from his inbox, erased all backups and thrown his laptop into an industrial incinerator, to avoid any future pain arising from accidentally stumbling across them while trawling his inbox for swimsuit season fashion tips.

Busy Season Tips: Conversation Starters

The apex of condescension comes in the form of an email entitled ‘Busy season tips: Conversation starters’ which is useful because, presumably, her colleagues are so socially inept they couldn’t talk a donkey’s arse into taking a shit. The offending manager goes on to drop pearls of wisdom like she’s an unmanned US drone indiscriminately dropping bombs on Aleppo. Bring on the rhymes:

‘Why not scan Google News right before you go anywhere where you might need to

make small talk?’

A quick perusal of today’s top Google news headlines show me that ‘Iraq hangs dozens for Isil's 2014 Speicher massacre’,‘Suicide bomber at Turkish wedding was boy aged 12-14’, and a ’Huge fire tears through secondary school; explosions heard’. Luckily I have a client meeting tomorrow with someone who someone who has previously told me that his personal hero is Douglas Carswell (the first Member of Parliament for the UK Independence Party). I can’t wait to find out what his nuanced views are on the indoctrination of children by Jihadist extremists.

‘Ask getting-to-know-you questions. [For example,] “What internet sites do you visit regularly?"

...These questions often reveal a hidden passion, which can make for great conversation.’

I’m sorry, but neither myself nor my client care about which internet sites I visit regularly and nor, I dare say, would either want to share that information with each other.  While I suspect that my client’s Financial Controller is a frequent poster on 4chan’s /b/ board, I am quite happy for that thought to remain unconfirmed.

‘If he makes a joke, even if it’s not very funny, try to laugh. If she offers some surprising information (“Did you know that the Harry Potter series have sold more than 450 million copies?”), react with surprise!’

If my client, apropos of nothing, told me that the Harry Potter books had sold more than 450 million copies, I think the most surprise I would physically be able to muster without injecting adrenaline into my arm would be manifest itself in the response ‘are you taking the fucking piss?’

‘Ask open questions that can’t be answered with a single word. For example, if you ask, “Where are you from?” an interesting follow-up question might be, “What would life be like for you at the moment if you still lived there?”

Given that my half of my clients come from the same place they are currently living, and most of the others have transferred from their native country via some faceless and homogenised multinational recently enough that they can still answer with some incredulity ‘exactly the fucking same as it was when I left’, this only really leaves those who have come to this country to escape war/famine/discrimination in their country of origin. For the sake of poking the wounds of forgotten childhood trauma, I think I’ll pass on this one.

~

Busy Season Tips: Coping with Stress

In the long awaited sequel to ‘Conversation starters’, our favourite tipster goes on to bust out home truths quicker than Biggie can bust rhymes. This is from her next hit, ‘Coping with stress’:

‘Look for unexpected surprises such as ‘my sunny office window’ or ‘cool work friends to have lunch with.’

1. Accountants don’t have cool work friends. It’s an oxymoron. 2.  Accountants don’t get to take lunch during busy season. 3. You sit in the same fucking place every day, the only way you office window could be an unexpected surprise if your eyes have been glued to the screen since the day you walked in the door and 4. For God’s sake don’t end a sentence a proposition with. Did people in this industry even go to school?

‘Challenge yourself to take a risk each day, whether it’s talking to someone new, asserting

yourself, trusting someone, setting a tough workout goal or anything that pushes you

out of your comfort zone.’

None of these examples are taking a risk in any meaningful sense of the word, unless you are the sort of person who considers choosing a different brand of wheat bran as being a potentially life changing step into the unknown. And no-one but an accountant would describe ‘talking to someone new’ as being ‘out of their comfort zone’.

‘Recite at least 10 reasons why you’re grateful for your job’

Okay, this one’s easy. Simply describe the 10 most spectacular and cathartic ways you can announce your resignation. Bonus points for publicly humiliating your bosses in the process.

~

Ultimately, your employer only has an interest in your work life balance up to a point. As much as they give lip service to the idea of a happy, enlightened work force, the truth is that the more happy & enlightened people become, the more they realise that a corporate office career provides an equivalent level of sustenance for your spiritual and moral well-being as a diet consisting solely of shoes would for your physical health.

Jumping off a first storey window over and over. A metaphor for the corporate life. (Incidentally, next time anyone claims that American comedy is even on a par with British comedy, show them this sketch)

A few months after these tips were published, an overworked junior employee the firm’s London office killed himself. In response, HR sent staff a video of a frog to explain the concept of work-life balance.