In today’s fast-paced world it is very easy for any business unit to become so focused on immediate objectives it forgets the impact of events in the immediate area. To assist in their preparedness, this white paper will propose a new series of warnings, watches, and advisories to be issued in the event of upcoming audit activities. The intent of these is to help ensure the health, safety, and sanity of all individuals involved in the audit process. 

Two weeks ago I threw a question out to our studio audience. Actually, this all started a short time before that when a question was posted as a comment to an earlier post. The question had nothing to do with my original post, but it was intriguing nonetheless. And that was the question I provided to all of you.

I just completed William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust which I picked up shortly after reading his novel The Sound and the Fury (but didn’t get to reading until about a year later), a book that is infinitely more confusing/challenging/insert-your-own-word-for-having-to-do-just-a-little-more-than-read-the-words-to-get-the-idea-of-what-is-going-on-in-the-book because, while Intruder in the Dust has a very stream of consciousness approach to its writing (and, not being an English major, there is a good chance I have used the wrong name for this style, but I think you can understand the style I mean)...

All audit departments, as with all other aspects of the business world, are experiencing turbulent times. We must all work faster, leaner, and more efficiently. Which means that all audit departments are continuously on the lookout for new and innovative ways to accomplish audit work in a faster, leaner, and more efficient manner. With that in mind, I am happy to provide the following suggestions on how to audit faster.

Sitting in the terminal of the Bob Hope Burbank Airport last Thursday morning (really early in the morning) I was just awake enough to notice something going on at the gate next to mine. Apparently, a local high school choir was headed to New York. My keen internal audit senses tingled to the sense that such might be the case when I noticed the gate listed New York as the destination of the flight, a group of high schoolers with a few already harried looking chaperones standing around the gate, and the matching shirts the high schoolers were wearing that, upon closer inspection, included both the high school’s name and the word “choir”. 

In the book review section of the March/April edition of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, I just read one of the finest analogies I’ve ever seen. James Sallis wrote: “Any of us who teach or speak on a regular basis develop a set of shticks, modules that we assemble into various configurations depending on the occasion. We’re like unimaginative banjo players, rolling off standard licks to fill available space.”

While attending GAM this week in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to watch the activities occurring in the casinos. In case you didn’t know, there is quite a bit of gambling that goes on here. It did not take me long to draw a parallel; to realize that, just as there are people who do not seem to be able to leave the casino floor, there are also people who seem to have trouble leaving their audit work at home. 

I asked for your thoughts on a question a reader posed in the comment section of one of my posts last week. We’ll come back and visit the answers to that question in a future installment. (Maybe next Monday – but one never knows, does one?) I want to give everyone just a little extra time to take a look and see if there are any other thoughts.

According to The Mental Floss History of the World (a nice little romp through all of the world’s history in 500 pages put together by Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand), the diary entry for King George III on July 4th, 1776, was “Nothing important happened today.” Oops.

Today we will be doing something a little different on “Humor Wednesdays”. (Okay, I promise I will never use that phrase again.) Rather than come up with a bit of hilarity, I want to direct you to GapingVoid.com. This website contains the bizarre mental meanderings of Hugh MacLeod.