A rant: making audit schedules

I am taking a minute at work to soak in preparing our audit department schedule.  I am allocating hours associated with projects to personnel by week in months with hours according to financial budgets and historical performance.  I have my name in the middle of this puzzle connected to preparing assessments, drafting financial statements and reviewing the work of others.  The whole paradigm is soaked in dependence and reliance.   

I can see where the others wasted hours, overages and the boss man keeping the difference and not coding the time that does not exist.  Hidden in the numbers is not what was not done, but what some were never capable of.  So in, the lies of the bourgeoisie are torn asunder when given to task, that in fact when call to arms or spade the strength in arm and faculty of mind is a withered vine.   

I know back for over a year I have been plotting my escape with my Rita Hayworth poster of Louis Armstrong up on my office wall next to the collage with Allen Toussaint and Indian Red.  My rock hammer for my chess pieces is in the Father’s Day canister my daughter made me from June 2009 with the footprints poem and her printed signature in pencil under contact paper.   

I know my boss knows or at least he should be able to figure out the logistics of the Tulane diploma and the thirty-three pictures of my daughter mounted on the wall behind my computer monitor.  “Do it for her,” Homer read.  The balance of age, of time passing I am sure is lost on the man as he is more concerned with his duck-call ring-tone on this iPhone than any interjected conversation about what happens if I leave.   

I have almost left at least four times now and at the last minute the ice fell through.  There is such comfortable and perilous ignorance on both ends.  Today I am listening to Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie marking off all these jumbled hours of time, that I know when I finish I hope to dump on the floor like numeric scrabble tiles and say, “Yeah, I tried.  Now figure it out without me.  You see this chart of what I do?  There are people who could do this.  Good luck trying to find one willing to live here to do it.  I tried to warn you to hedge your risks against me by offering to teach you.  You thought it better to pursue other tasks than figuring out how to navigate the software I installed on your laptop.”

The city is always that whisper away and maybe it is coming soon.  I finally have the numbers to the broker man and yet I have the same cold doubts that it ever had a chance of working out.  If it ever did I am sure it would be the work of liars playing poker, bluffing a pile of spoils and when have I ever won a bet?  So I have to let the walking-dead know the desolation that I have to take care of me.  So nah, there may be this little thing and so in everything is better with the humility.  So I’ll stick to that.  Johnny says, “I am going to break my rusty cage and run.”