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One of the perks coming from working for a large multi-national company is that international opportunities do come up, and relocation services often accompany permanent transfers. I always toyed with the idea, but instead found myself happy to experience short-term adventures instead . There's mounds of paperwork to sift through when you're moving from one country to another - both the internal reviews and approvals you need to process and get blessed by the right people - and in terms of severing your ties with your old home. There are deliciously complicated tax implications - leaving the country often means the tax authorities "pretend" ("deem") that you have sold your investments, so they can capture one more tax bill from you before you go. Selling your home is another adventure in red tape. Fortunately the relocation service may take care of that for you. Unfortunately someone still ends up suffering through some form of madness. Do check out master realtor...
It's good to be proud of your work. If you've done a good job, you can take pleasure in the fact that it's error free. And yet, people may say things like, "are you sure you didn't double-count those items?" You may be 100% correct in saying, "of course I didn't," with a self-righteous huff. That doesn't mean you should , though. Let's assume that you are in fact correct. Rather than scorn those who are helping you by examining your work to avoid embarassing mistakes, thank them for their concern and interest. Then let's assume that the people asking you are very knowledgeable, and they aren't just asking the question to give you a hard time. Now stop and ask yourself, "why are they asking me this?" Is it, perhaps, because your work may in fact be entirely correct, but you didn't present your thought process in a very clear and logical manner? Are you hiding some important facts or assumptions which cause people to second...
Deloitte may want to add " secure the twitter accounts " to their handbook of "things to do when layoffs begin." HMV stores are in "administration," which is a form of bankruptcy in the UK and now the mass layoffs are underway, sadly. In business school one of my favourite professors warned us that if our solution to a problem was to just start firing people left, right, and centre, we were Doing it Wrong, and she wouldn't give us a very good mark. Every scenario is different, but I greatly respected her for pushing people away from the noxious "you're fired!" mindset and towards more creative solutions that recognize that jobs are important and the last thing you want to do is carelessly deprive someone of their livelihood. Anyway, as the news media gleefully reports , while the 190 or so people were being told it was all over, their social media planner Poppy Rose Cleere posted hits like the following: “We’re tweeting live from HR where...
Accountants have found that the internet has things like... online videos. The results are stunning. Rod Barr, the President and CEO of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario delivers a going concern level of delicious snark in the first 25 seconds of this video . He says that we are having an important vote, and "apparently our webinar series is not capturing the excitement of this complex, impending change." He continues, "accordingly, we have to try something new. How about this?" Then the "typography"-ish music video kicks into gear through the magic of a glowing yellow orb that appears in his hand. Apparently senior CAs who become FCAs have magic powers that are poorly understood. Feel free to discuss this madness on ACS' facebook page while I figure out how to upgrade the commenting system here. The video is at 3496 views as of now - curious to see how viral it gets.
A colleague and I chatted about a fancy restaurant today, remarking on how it seats very few people but charges a relatively high price for meals. Could it survive? We ran the numbers out loud - estimating how much it probably makes each night, and what its likely expenses are. Didn't even break a sweat. A byproduct of years of experience in the restaurant industry, or just some good business sense developed from doing seemingly everything? The latter is usually the case. Having made some rather huge assumptions, the restaurant in question may be grossing 20% after the cost of food and labour. Is that enough to cover the utilities, rent and other costs we haven't included? We'll see if they're still open a year from now I suppose.
It's too late for me to edit this down, so here's your summary for the TLDR crowd: accounting internships are awesome because you actually get paid. Journalism internships are tough to survive because they're typcially unpaid. There's some gender politics mixed in here, so read on if you want a rant on the associated economics of the male/female split on pay.
It's the calm before the paperstorm, and the most wonderful time of the year for Chartered Accountants working in firms that enforce a Christmas Holiday Blackout period, where non-essential work is put on hold to let the staff and partners spend some time with family before disappearing into the dank pit known as Busy Season. I hear PriceWaterhouseCoopers is good about not even agreeing to doing special assignments during the Christmas break - hopefully your firm has a similar attitude towards demands for reports getting issued around December 31 or so. It being the calendar year end, there are some things that may be inescapable due to poor planning. Such as inventory counts that have to happen on December 31. Good luck if you're stuck on one of those. IT auditors and anyone else who needs "point in time" evidence will also be scrambling with clients who "didn't feel like" or "were too busy" to prepare evidence of password settings and other information...
I'm preparing a special post at a special Time and Place (edit: it's now up ) on the Battle of the Bands. To tide you over, here's a little teaser. Every band had an intro video. Deloitte recounted its "League of Rock," and the others introduced their bands in their own particular way. Here's Ernst and Young's take on an intro video for their band, the Going Concerns. I love the tagline - Accountable to No One. More to come.
Something that helped me immensely when I was preparing for the CKE , and should be helpful to anyone taking a multiple choice test designed by halfwits, was to realize that the test was probably designed by someone who wasn't thinking things through very much. Reading too much into a question is a recipie for anguish and anger. If you make it all the way through this rant you'll pick up a tip that will prove invaluable on your next multiple choice test. Yes, you may be right when presented with all the possible exceptions to a scenario, but in an ordinary multiple choice question, go with the answer they're "looking for" rather than the answer that shows off how smart you are. It's sad but true: learning more facts and gaining more knowledge than expected of you can actually end up harming you, when you're presented what the test writer would consider to be a "simple" question. Right lane, left lane : right answer, left answer. Step away from the...
Last time we discussed the joy of empty roads and the ability to find a seat on a subway train when commuting home from work . I of course glossed over the fact that you can also avoid the rush by leaving before 5 pm, but that crazy notion should seem absolutely foreign to anyone living in AuditLand so why bring it up? Sure, an auditor could come in at 7 am instead of 8:30 or 9. Would it mean they would leave one or two hours earlier? If you think the answer is yes don't let an actual auditor know that. The bitterness of their laugh, while epic, may cause permanent scarring. On your soul. Anyway, long hours. Why bother subjecting yourself to that sort of torture? You must learn. Unless you're some mad prodigy who picks up everything on the first shot perfectly, you need to practice if you are going to have any hope of getting good at something. And auditors are constantly being bombarded by new "somethings". An average clerk may spend days or weeks becoming proficient...
I was going to compare the punishing hours one experiences in AuditLand to the more "normal" hours experienced by most other people and make some lofty defense about the good things that come about from sticking around an audit room while an entire client site empties out promptly at quitting time. And we'll get to that. Eventually. But first let's talk about one entirely practical upside: skipping the 5 pm rush on public transit, particularly overburdened systems like the TTC is nice. People who go home between 6 pm and midnight are not aware of what "crush load" really means. Having said that, the people who are leaving at all sorts of crazy late hours do miss out on various things, like a healthy and normal meal with family or the ability to go out with friends on a weeknight. So it's not *much* of an upside, but when you're sinking in the ocean, there's no point in turning down a life preserver simply because the shade of orange on the jacket...
Good news! Especially if you were on the fence about getting a Playbook when it went on sale last month, hemmed and hawed, and then realized it was too late to order one, only to find out you could still get one from Shopblackberry.com, just to endure a cycle of cancellation, re-ordering, more cancellation, frustration with a coda of "well, you can mail us a cheque and then we'll send you one." Ridiculous. Fortunately Future Shop, Best Buy, and presumably other fine retailers have it online for their Boxing Day sales, which started last night already. $249 for a Playbook, which I can use to easily sahre the photos I took the with 5 megapixel camera on my phone? Works for me. Better than the $20 off sale for the $499 Apple tablet - there's many good things about the iOS and iPad products, including legendary customer service, but affordability isn't one of them. I'd rather pay less and solve problems myself, no matter how insane. Merry Christmas to all!
Once in a while a staff-produced parody video is inspired. This is one of those . A few points of clarifications. First off, JIT stands for "Just in Time," which at Ernst & Young as well as other firms is a meeting room used for impromptu meetings and other sessions where more privacy than that provided by a standard cubical is needed. A "TPE" is a Team Planning Event, used to prepare for audits. The reference to Turley relates to the firm's global CEO, "GAMx" is the E&Y proprietary audit software program, and WBLs are "Web based learning," which are computer-based training courses often used in distance education, and in this case, used by the firm's staff to school them where a classroom session doesn't make as much sense. Also note how easy to make it look like someone standing at a photocopier is feeling miserable or annoyed. Thanks again to Going Concern for the tip.
Three cars wrecked. That I know of. Two people fled away from Canada. For China. One staff hospitalized. For completely unrelated reasons. All of 'my people' are now healthy and accounted for, though. So all-in-all, the first year of life as a manager in my firm went by pretty smoothly. I was not in any of the wrecked cars when those incidents happened, and I'll ascribe the blame to an unfamiliarity with winter driving and the lack of snow tires on rental cars for all those situations, except one. In that case, it wasn't a rental, and the driver wasn't contending with winter driving conditions either. None of my staff wrecked their cars during the 2010 Olympic victory parades. That was well before my promotion. As well, the staff with the medical scare was fine in the end, but it was a good precaution at the time. And you couldn't really blame it on his work; if anything, I'm proud of the fact that my standing rule of, "you don't feel well, you go home...
I'm very happy to see Bixi arrive in Toronto. Sometimes it doesn't make sense to walk a block or two to the subway, to ride two stops, and then walk another two blocks. And if traffic is heavy, a taxi may take just as long. With Bixi, there's a new option, and it's great. I'm in that happy spot where the teams I work on are full of young people happy and willing to try out 'craaaazy' ideas like renting a bike to go to a client's office, so we did just that last week. We saved the client money by not taking a cab - I know the fares, and the savings were close to 50% - and given how long it took, we didn't waste any of our time either. Judging by downtown Toronto traffic these days, our mode of transportation was faster than driving. Win. The only thing Bixi lacks is 4-person bikes - for you and three kids. Though it'd probably be best for those to belong to people who know what they're doing, like the owner if this fine bicycle in Amsterdam. Oh...
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