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What’s the best thing you can hear an auditor say? “You’ve done my audit for me.” She was here less than an hour, took a few notes from the mountain of material I provided her, and asked me to make a copy the summary page, because it had all of the basic information she needed. I’m not sure that even qualifies as an audit, if you take the company flunky’s word for everything. I guess she did some spot-checking, or maybe she was just comparing my records with the “real” auditor’s report, but it was quite a relief to have her gone, nice as she was.
Now that it’s over, I feel as if I’ve wasted the last three days and nights worrying it to death. That’s pretty typical, though. I always seem to look back at the end of any undertaking and find something to regret about it, whether it’s turned out good or bad. If things work, I think I could have done better. If things don’t work, I beat myself up over what I did wrong. And in a case like this one, which turned out to be no big deal, I regret the time spent fretting and stewing over the parts of it that I’d either already done or didn’t need to do to get ready for it.
On the other hand, maybe it was good to go over every possible worst-case scenario in my head for three nights running. It wasn’t good for my sleep patterns or my general health, I’m sure, but it made the actual event quite a bit less intimidating when it was actually going on.
Sure, she asked some questions that I fumbled for answers to, but I’m never at ease with strangers, so that was one of the scenarios I’d already considered. She wanted to know more details about what the company does than any other auditor has ever asked. Do you think I know what kind of tools and machinery we have in our shop? Not a clue, and I told her so. The usual stuff, I said, hammers and saws and such. I barely know what our crew does, much less what they use to do it. |
