I keep going to meetings, and people keep saying strange things. So, I present to you installment number four of actual “things” people said during meetings over the last few months.

We wake up in our room. We wake up in a hotel room. We wake up at our desk having fallen asleep at the computer. We wake up on the couch. We wake up on the floor. The alarm clock wakes us up. The cold wakes us up. The heat wakes us up. We wake up early. We oversleep. 

We auditors are a horribly misunderstood lot. We speak plain, ordinary English, but our clients and customers consistently misconstrue what we say. We know exactly what we mean, but others derogatorily claim we use “Auditese.” How can we do any more than say exactly what we want to say? There seems no way to fight it. So, to help us all better understand the miscommunication that is occurring, I provide the following comparison of what auditors say to what management hears. (With thanks to Larry Hubbard who came up with the idea and supplied some of these translations.)

A few months ago, a group of us were entering another in the seemingly endless team meetings that make up our existence. An auditor, wanting to be excused from the meeting, made the comment, “Nothing he has to say is as important as my utilization rate.” The message was clear: I am not measured on how many meetings I attend; I am measured on how much work I accomplish.

During a break in a recent committee meeting, a fellow internal audit professional and I started talking about books. She asked me what I read and I began by explaining that I am a big fan of science fiction. I was unable to describe my other tastes because she got that look. You know the one; the look that combines the pursed lips of having devoured a dozen lemons on the half-shell with the disappointed look your parents gave you after – well, after just about everything you did. (Tell me, what exactly does “not living up to your potential mean”? I know I can look it up, but that seems like a lot of work.)

For your consideration, a set of tongue twisters for the audit-minded. (With no guarantee that they will make sense.)

Here’s a quick, easy question. How do you report positive things?  This is a topic I’ve seen come up again and again over the years. And, one more time, it has come up within our audit department. During meetings with some of our customers, they questioned why we never report any of the good things that are happening within their departments. We were somewhat taken aback because we felt we had been giving them credit for good work. 

There is a little grammar geek in all of us. Some of you exhibit it on a very limited basis. You correct a mispelled  misspeled misspelled word. You occasionally notice that their not correct or its important to get it right. You cringe, just a little bit, when someone uses the wrong tense of the verb (even if you don’t know that what you are cringing at is an incorrect verb tense.)

I feel a great disturbance in the force. Yes, for one full week I have failed to fulfill my self-imposed obligation to complete three blog posts per week. I was late on a couple in the beginning, and in the last month or so I actually didn’t post a couple of times. But this marks the first time I’ve missed a full week.  Which raises the question - would they miss you if you were gone?