Working for the Gu’mint
My supervisor often says “we run on rules, not logic” when something stupid comes up that we have to comply with.
When I first started travel expense claims were done on a paper form, we filled it out, put it with the hotel receipt and any business expense receipts and mail it to the accounting office. (hotel receipt MUST be zero balance and only 1 person in the room, commonly hotels put 2 on the form just as a default and I have to make sure they change it to 1, don’t ask me why, our accountants don’t like 2 on there, freaks them out).
Then at my previous job about 15 years ago they said we got this wonderful new computer system, just do it on-line, SAVE PAPER!!! So we get to the training, all about how to do it YAY wonderful great. At the end the instructor says get this…the system prints a transmittal form (more pages than the old manual one), have your supervisor sign it and then mail it and copies of the receipts to the accounting office. We probably had a confused look on our faces but we did it, can’t fight the bean counters.
Then I get to the State Fire Department, new job (12 years ago). My new bosses had talked the accounting office into accepting PDF of everything. We didn’t bother to sign the transmittal, the supervisor entering his password into the system was good enough.
All of a sudden last week I guess they finally caught up to us. Bulletin comes out, you must have supervisor sign form and mail it over. Darn. Read further, they accept Docusign. Okay we are getting somewhere. I find the IT guy and he comes over and shows us how to ship it to our Supervisor for Docusign, then after he does that it goes to the accounting office automatically. I don’t really know what difference it makes but okay we will comply.
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