Smartassery

Is that time of the year to send the fourth quarter reports of 2005 to our beloved investors. Actually, the time was three months ago but:

a) our investors are already used to our huge level of inefficiency and utter incapability to do anything properly, so they don’t hold this firm to the same high standards they would hold everyone else; and

b) the managing directors are so preoccupied with concocting ways to line their pockets with all the cash that’s piled up in the fund management accounts, that they often forget the timeframe in which they are supposed to do things.

For the record, the infernal report is put together (and I use this term very loosely) by management. That means that the directors need to meet with the controller (yes, the CFO couldn’t take it anymore and ceremoniously quit last year amid hurrahs from the crowd — mostly just myself) and agree on manipulating certain figures, and write up a bullshit story as an introduction. Then they would pass all this on to me and I will do a merge mail and send to everyone by e-mail. Also, for the record, this bloody mess of data is all contained in 5 different formats (Publisher, Word, Excel, Access, and Acrobat) just to make my life easier.

So naturally, every time they have “forgotten” to prepare a report, they act as if it’s the end of the world and, of course, it’s all my fault. Then they will pull me into the Spanish Inquisition, I mean the  partner meeting:

Partners: We’re going over the logistics of the quarterlies. Are you on board with the process?

Beatrix Kiddo: Uh. yes. As usual. I’m just waiting on all of you to give me the data.

P:  Yes, but is there anything you can do in the meantime to accelerate the process.

BK: Err. No. The mailing list is always ready (as I’ve told you 8 times before). I just need the data so I can plug it into the mail merge documents.

P: How long does the mail merge take?

BK: Well, given that I do everything around here and we have four funds (and we have the sorriest and slowest computers in the universe), it takes me about 3 days to distribute everything.

P: OK. if there’s anything we can do to help, let us know.

BK: You could start by giving me the data.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Vapid Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.