The Blonde Diaries

I have a rare day off tomorrow during my “busy season”. I’ve talked before about my real job as an auditor – Financial Statement auditor not tax auditor – and right now we are in the mist of busy season. I have a well earned and very rare day off tomorrow and I am trying to decide how I am going to spend it. I know I will be hitting up Anthropologie to make a couple of returns, picking up some packages at my apartment office, and returning a book to the library. Other than that my day is free and I might just keep it that way.

My rare day off comes after I worked 80 hours last week. Let me tell you, that was not easy and I am still recovering sleep wise. I am excited though because we got our filing out Friday and I was able to meet the impossible deadline that was set for me. So I feel a little relieved and renewed. I am hoping for a strong finish during the second half of busy season and then some much needed time off in March to recoup and start sticking my nose out there to see what the job market looks like.

Being a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), I am constantly reminded of my Continuing Professional Education (CPE) requirements.  These requirements are to complete course to keep our professional education current and up to date.  These courses are usually covering topics such as accounting matters and developments, ethics, and soft skills.  Soft skills are those skills that are people related – open communication, dealing with difficult employees, difficult converstations, giving effective feedback.  You get the picture. Often times, I am able to complete my CPE requirements through work. There are other times, I wonder if there is something better out there than just flipping and reading slides over and over for hours on end.

What I found was there are programs available to anyone online through learn.com. Learn.com offers programs for a variety of Job skills that you can take from the comfort of your home. These job skills cover a variety of topics such as learning Microsoft Office to learning how to manage difficult people. I have to admit I am terrible with confrontation so I try to avoid it at all costs. Unfortunately, I have found this past year that that isn’t always the best route to take. So I’ve been looking for new ways to learn how to deal with difficult employees. Learn.com had a course on Dealing with Difficult People so I decided to give it a try. The entire course was video interactive and only 15 minutes long. Two great perks that differentiate this course from the ones I have taken through work. In these 15 minutes, I was able to quickly learn what makes an employee a difficult employee, how to deal with a difficult employee, and when you need to draw the boundary line and find the strength within to deal with a difficult situation if one is presented. Fifteen minutes didn’t sound too long to learn anything about dealing with difficult employees, but I found they were more than enough once I took the course. I really appreciated the tips and suggestions found in this course. It was nice to learn that dismissal isn’t always the best answer. In fact, there are other answers such as “a change in scenery” or talking with someone else to learn new ideas on managing difficulty. Overall, I found this course effective and look forward to taking other mini-courses through Learn.com to help develop my soft skill set at work.

I haven’t posted too much about the filing saga Mike has been going through. He has been senioring an audit out of town since late August. It was a 2 year back audit and a current year audit because this company is interested in going public in a few years and wanted a “big” name signing their audit opinion. So Mike was the lucky winner of this job and has been going back and forth for 8 months now trying to get everything done. He thought it was over on Tuesday but of course someone had to have an “issue” and drag out their testing. Today though Mike walked in the door at 6:30 which was really early announcing they are filing tomorrow. I am ecstatic because we can finally get back into our cooking and going to the gym routine on weeknights and we get to have free weekends not this needing to go into work on the weekends.

Just wondering if maybe the calendar fairies could stop by and push the calendar forward a few weeks for me. I realize my work is not done yet but I am tired of working late, not going to the gym, and eating really unhealthy food. I have wised up and began bringing lunch AND dinner in order to avoid ordering in every day at work and so I don’t end up eating at 10pm when I am getting home right now. But it is getting old and I am getting tired.

If I bring another lean cuisine or sandwich to work I think I will throw myself out of the window. Anyone have any good recipes?

Man it has been one of those weeks. I am worn out and it is only 5:30pm this lovely Friday afternoon. I knew this week was going to be rough because the past three weeks I have only gone to work for 2 days (9 hours each day) and with traveling until late Sunday night I was worn out before the week began.

This week I had my intern start which meant an over eager and very efficient personality to try and find busy work to keep him out of my hair and unhappy staff for whatever reasons. I can’t help make them happy if they don’t share. *Sigh* And then lots and lots of meetings. Meetings with managers, meetings with client contacts, meetings with our cross lines of service people, meeting with my coach. I think you get the idea. I am meeting outed.

So Thank Goodness It’s Friday. I needed the weekend to come a few days ago. I’m going to use this weekend to sit back and rest up for the wild weeks ahead.