Lessons in anger management

Good old Stuart Weitzman. Every woman´s best friend. He makes comfortable party shoes. I have two pairs that have gotten me through many a wedding (not my own!) without too many blisters. I picked these up at a 70% mark-down, at my local old-but-classic shoe store. I do not know what it is about me and pink shoes. These are not the shoes of a girl listening a lot to "Rage against the machine" on the tram to work. You think. Well, good. Then I managed to fool you all. I am actually an undercover angry person.  At least today.

It´s that time of the month again. And I am not talking about THAT time of the month. No, I am talking about month-end. Being a consultant, you are what you invoice. You invoice zero, you ARE a zero. It´s tough, but either you can handle it - or you can´t. So. Every last working day of the month, you have to make sure that you have registered all your hours correctly, or there will be no money coming in. Which would be a very bad thing for your company. And you need to file your expense reports. Otherwise, you will need to pay for those flights out of your own pocket, which would be a very bad thing for you.

So, last night was time to go through all of my handbags, jackets, coats, and "the-computer-bag-from-hell" (has a gazillion pockets that hide stuff), to retrieve bus tickets, cab receipts, boarding passes and anything else work-related. Knowing how many handbags and jackets I have, this is a real pain in the a**. Afterwards, you need to sort out what is truly work-related, and then GLUE all these tiny slips of paper on to bigger pieces of paper, so that it looks half decent when the accounting people receive it. I have never tried the "plastic bag" trick, where you just hand over a bag with all your receipts for someone to sort out. My grandfather was an auditor, so I think this is something in my gene pool. I simply do it properly, or not at all.

The hours are easy to register, as you keep track of this on a running basis, BUT you need to register them at least once for invoicing. Then, sometimes the client requires you to register the same hours in their own system, to get them approved properly. Which makes sense. Then - IF you deliver as a subcontractor, it might be that you need to post you hours there as well. So far, so good.  

Now is when the real fun starts. Because now you do it all again in each project manager´s very, very adhoc spreadsheet. Knowing that spreadsheets can actually tell a lot about what is going on - or sometimes absolutely NOT going on - in a person´s brain, this can be a right out frightening task. And - if you are among the "chosen ones" - you ARE a project manager too! Then you get to chase these other slackers to fill in your own personal genius spreadsheets. Wheeew. I am sorry, but this process really kills me. Every time. In my ideal world, the client just sends you a check in the mail (or even better, WIRE the money) to your company once a month, if they were happy with what you did and wanted to see you again. If they really wanted to see you again, they would send a huge check. If they were not too keen on seeing you, maybe just an envelope with some spare change and a bus ticket. Or put a horse´s head in your bed or something.

My adorable husband just sent me an e-mail asking me out for dinner tonight. I am now suddenly happy as a bird again. Even bought myself flowers on the way home from bone-breaking session. I guess this will be a good weekend after all. Just need to pop by the office with all these pieces of paper first.