Today started out by dropping off my wife at work and then going to work myself. I had not been at work for 30 minutes when I got a phone call from the wife telling me that she had just gotten fired and to come get her. As you can imagine she was upset about this turn of events especially since she just started this job three weeks ago. The reason that they fired her was because she was not getting it. They also said that she did not finish her work on Saturday and left without doing it. As you probably already know in the state of SC the employer does not even need a reason to fire you. You are employed at will and the employer and yourself can terminate that employment at will as well. Neither one of you have to have a reason however the employer requires that you give them 2 weeks notice while at the same time they don't have to give you 5 seconds notice.
The problem with this picture is that my wife is a very intelligent and hard working individual who has always been a long term employee. I will indulge the fact that she prefers to be in a classroom setting and probably excels at teaching children more than she does in a restaurant or shop setting where she has to do things she is not too familiar with. When they said she did not do her job on Saturday they did not care that she did not finish all of the tasks given to her because she was stuck at the cash register the entire 7 hours. She also was told that she could not work beyond her shift. How in the world was she supposed to finish her side tasks if she was told to run the cash register?
I know, what is done is done and it does not matter that I think that her supervisor is full of malarkey. They decided that they did not like my wife for whatever reasons and dumped her back out on the street from where she came. I know and Katy knows that life is not fair and you just have to suck it up and go on. The good news is that school starts in about two weeks and Katy can always be a substitute teacher at one of the Charleston County schools in the immediate area.
This month we are hoping to get our daughter tested for her official drivers license. I have been getting her to cart me here and there in the Durango in an effort for her to get some more experience. Princess does pretty good with regards to handling the vehicle on a two lane road as well as freeway driving. She still needs to work on her turning from one lane and keeping the vehicle in the same lane she is turning into. In her defense the love boat is not exactly the easiest vehicle to learn how to drive. All in all she is doing pretty well. The next step for her will be to learn how to parallel park and do a three point turn. I am not sure I even know what that is but now that Katy is off of work for the next two weeks she can figure out a way to do this. Monitoring my daughters driving habits has been interesting and a test of my patience. One of the things that I have had to do is to remind my princess that part of driving from point A to point B is to know where you are at and where you are going. I guess I had forgotten that when you are just riding in a vehicle all the time you really dont pay attention to how you get somewhere.
I have learned the hard way that working for a publicly traded company means that you get to participate in lots of audits through the year. My goal once I am done with my degree program and have my new certifications is to find employment somewhere that is NOT a publicly traded company so I can alleviate a lot of stress and headaches from my work day. Thanks to people and organizations who have defrauded others of their hard earned cash the rest of us have to suffer through the painful audit process. Here is how it works.
The organization creates and publishes its I.T. Policies which include how you are to perform you daily, weekly and monthly tasks. The company then hires an outside consulting firm who then analyzes your tasks and makes you create data controls to match those tasks. Then the organization deems it necessary for you to perform all the tasks outlined in each data control so that you can pass an audit. Then the auditing firm comes through and puts all of your actions under a microscope to make sure you have performed all of the data controls to the letter and requires that you give them evidence of doing it.
It all boils down to checks and balances and all of the data controls are just a fancy way of encapsulating everything that you already should be doing in order to safeguard and protect the financial information that you are entrusted to take care of. If mistakes are found, and there usually are some human errors that pop up then you get to go through what is known as remediation. Remediation means that you sit down with your boss and the bosses boss and that bosses boss with the auditor and you get to explain why you screwed up. Once you have announced to the world that you are an idiot and promise not to ever not do that task the wrong way again you get to help redefine the data control that contains all of the tasks or task in question.
In an audit you only did a task if you can provide evidence that you did it. That evidence needs to be something that is generated by the system or systems that you are managing. Not only that but there has to be multiple people involved in each check and balance to confirm that you did in fact do the task that you said that you did.
We have decided that by the end of September or the beginning of October we are going to take a week off and go back to Texas. All of our friends and family are there and we have not been back home in about 6 years. We are hoping that we can fly vs driving so we can spend more of our time enjoying our time with everyone vs eating up the time driving between states. I am ready for some much needed time away from work.
James Moffitt
http://www.lightourworld.com
chiefpropellerhead@comcast.net
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