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...because Irene is going to return to work only tomorrow, and Gerald is still home sick, and there's a lot of work to be done.
Yesterday's plans re. an extended lunch break were sabotaged by the ministry of finance having transferred the Embassy's tax refund to our account, and by the goodness of my heart -- I couldn't very well disappear for a three-hour break and tell the visa applicants from Kosovo to come back today for their visas. So I spent the day bookkeeping in two different programmes (totally hair-raising, but it's only till the end of the year; after that, we'll be working only with the new system), vetting visa applications, controlling the inventory, printing visa stickers... Yeah, it was mega-fun.
Since we're still running the two accounting systems parallel to each other, and the Ambassador is putting his signature on the receipts generated by the old system, I've been using his password up till now to sign electronically in the new system. Starting from January 2, though, I mustn't do that anymore, for obvious reasons. So he'll have to do it all by himself, and of course there hasn't been any training or anything for heads of mission, because it's bad enough they have to soil their delicate hands with such lowly things as accounting, but to actually train them would be beyond intolerable. I, on the other hand, have no intention whatsoever of telling him every day which button to click etc., and so I invested two hours of my precious time into making an idiot-proof (or so I hope) user manual with lots of piccies and arrows and very little text. So if he actually remembers his password, he ought to be able to do it. The thing is, he really ought to sign those electronic receipts every day, and I very much doubt he's going to do that. If he doesn't, the process will be slowed down considerably, but there's nothing I can do about that.
Looking at the brighter side of things, though, tomorrow there won't be much work to do, and Monday is a public Macedonian holiday (not really, but they get an en-lieu day if a holiday falls on a Sunday), and I've taken half of it off work. Friday January 6 is a public holiday in both Austria and Macedonia, which means next week has basically three working days, and the visa section will be closed. So that's nice, and what's even nicer is the fact that I took the 19th and 20th off work, so I'll have a four-day weekend.
I really need that -- I guess it's a combination of the lack of light in winter and the sudden plunge of the fun coefficient here at the embassy. Besides, I've got to think of literally *everything* now that I'm without Gerald and Irene, and that makes for the kind of stress I don't like overly much.
Well, at least the back is better. And tonight I'm going out for dinner with tennis!Elena.
Yesterday's plans re. an extended lunch break were sabotaged by the ministry of finance having transferred the Embassy's tax refund to our account, and by the goodness of my heart -- I couldn't very well disappear for a three-hour break and tell the visa applicants from Kosovo to come back today for their visas. So I spent the day bookkeeping in two different programmes (totally hair-raising, but it's only till the end of the year; after that, we'll be working only with the new system), vetting visa applications, controlling the inventory, printing visa stickers... Yeah, it was mega-fun.
Since we're still running the two accounting systems parallel to each other, and the Ambassador is putting his signature on the receipts generated by the old system, I've been using his password up till now to sign electronically in the new system. Starting from January 2, though, I mustn't do that anymore, for obvious reasons. So he'll have to do it all by himself, and of course there hasn't been any training or anything for heads of mission, because it's bad enough they have to soil their delicate hands with such lowly things as accounting, but to actually train them would be beyond intolerable. I, on the other hand, have no intention whatsoever of telling him every day which button to click etc., and so I invested two hours of my precious time into making an idiot-proof (or so I hope) user manual with lots of piccies and arrows and very little text. So if he actually remembers his password, he ought to be able to do it. The thing is, he really ought to sign those electronic receipts every day, and I very much doubt he's going to do that. If he doesn't, the process will be slowed down considerably, but there's nothing I can do about that.
Looking at the brighter side of things, though, tomorrow there won't be much work to do, and Monday is a public Macedonian holiday (not really, but they get an en-lieu day if a holiday falls on a Sunday), and I've taken half of it off work. Friday January 6 is a public holiday in both Austria and Macedonia, which means next week has basically three working days, and the visa section will be closed. So that's nice, and what's even nicer is the fact that I took the 19th and 20th off work, so I'll have a four-day weekend.
I really need that -- I guess it's a combination of the lack of light in winter and the sudden plunge of the fun coefficient here at the embassy. Besides, I've got to think of literally *everything* now that I'm without Gerald and Irene, and that makes for the kind of stress I don't like overly much.
Well, at least the back is better. And tonight I'm going out for dinner with tennis!Elena.
