petty things

As a rule, there are both big and little things that need to be worried about. At home, there are leaves to pick up and there is college to plan for. There’s ballet shoes and farm boots to be purchased and there’s plumbing and electrical remodels we need. There are viruses and sore throats, and then there’s glaucoma and psychological well-being.

At work, it’s no different. Today I spent large pieces of the morning realizing why this building needs its own accountant, someone who can distinguish between an account that starts with “99” and “52”, someone who knows how to fill out the one form for salaried people and the other form for non-salaried people, someone who could decode an electronic system that displays deposits to an account that total things like $1975.50, even though all of the line items that should add up to this amount come in $150 increments.

To track down these details, I called one of our institution’s finest accountants. By “finest,” I mean the person who sends yelling memos that not only make grown men cry, but also get cc’d to a variety of peers, supervisors, office mates, your mother, and the Pope. (I’m exaggerating. My mother isn’t included in that list.) Interestingly, she didn’t know the answer to my question, and she referred me to the accountant in another cubicle. That accountant knew that there existed an answer, but called upon someone else in another office to write a program to generate the report that would detail the answer, probably. That report will be available tomorrow on a system known as “Crystal Reports,” which is a system I’m only vaguely familiar with, accessed through another online system, so I’ll need to learn this to understand the answer to the question that took three other people to help me track down.

Incidentally, I’ve been saying “mother fucker” a lot lately, under my breath. It’s a recent development.

Part of my under-my-breath expletives have come about as I’ve been trying to facilitate the hiring of someone to pick up where S. left off in not only keeping a Center afloat, but beginning to reinvent and reinvigorate the place. She could only do this for so long, but fortunately this forced people to find money … for one year. And, thus, after other petty issues with another office whose name I won’t reveal, but whose initials are HR, a long, slow search revealed a clear candidate … who then turned us down. And another candidate, after a reboot of the search, more clarification, more new directions and better vision, also had to back out. And now we’re directorless and we’re rebooting again. And this isn’t a big deal; it would even be a petty thing, like accounting and reports, except for the fact that it’s one of the reasons I work here. Not the reason, but it’s a reason.

So this morning, while doing accounting and reports and reconciling, when I got a call from a vice president in a provost’s office at another institution, telling me they had donations that have already added up to half a million dollars and a line item for a director position that they wanted me to consider, I paused and listened. I imagine that there’s an accountant in there in that budget. That’s a petty thing, but in the 15th week of a long semester and after a morning of doing things I’m not trained to do, I’m a little more intrigued than I might otherwise be. (Perhaps that VP knew exactly what I was doing, looking in through my office window?) I don’t want another job, but I wouldn’t mind it if my (or any one of my colleagues) job didn’t ever have to involve tracking down three different accountants to understand one line on my budget.

It’s a petty thing to write about, but it’s cheap therapy.