Why do I bother coming to work? This is a serious question. Right now I'd add just as much value to this company sat at home playing Civ.

I try to help, I really do, but after years of swimming uphill to achieve anything I've had to accept the worrying conclusion that there are a large number of people working for this company that are deliberately attempting to defy anything that I do.

I'm not going to lie. This is an extraordinarily stressful time for me in the role I'm currently in. While simply submitting our latest forecast sounds like a banausic and routine thing to do, the barriers which need to be regularly overcome in order to fulfil the needs of the business are quite exceptional. So once the process is completed, and the big problem of finding the bottom number is out of the way, you'd expect that I could get back to doing something of use.

Unfortunately, finding the magic number is only half of the process. In order to complete the forecast, we then have to input the detailed numbers into our system so we can measure performance against the forecast online. There are two steps to this process - submitting into the group accounting system, for consolidation purposes, and submitting into our everyday system, for management accounting purposes.

The former is traditionally the home of angina attacks, mental breakdowns and other stress related illnesses. Personally, I tend to just suffer from large quantities of mouth ulcers in the days we're going through this. I have a bitch of one inside my lip right now.

The traditional beauty though, is when you're finally done with this laborious and painful task. The feeling of elation, and the weight that lifts from your unfurrowing brow is most uplifting. It's all out of the way and you can forget about it until 'next time'�. The final part of the whole process is traditionally the easiest, because we're left to do it however we want, because they're our accounts.

Not, apparently, anymore. As background, in order to forecast how the next four months of the year will go, and what the end of year picture will be, we need the data for the year so far, taken offline so that we can crunch the numbers. So when it comes to inputting the finalised forecast into the system, it makes sense just to upload our entire analysis because it's already reconciled, and tested for completeness in every way necessary.

The powers that be have decided that we don't need to do this, and have copied the existing 'year to date' data across from the actual system into the area we were going to put the forecast for the first 8 months of the year. Great, you might think. That saves me the effort. Only it doesn't. Firstly, the numbers they've copied across aren't complete, and we're talking about a �12m discrepancy here. Not small beer. Further, they've 'locked' those months in the system so we can't correct it.

To further compound this problem, we only have two ways of putting the forecast data into the system - all twelve months at once, or one month at a time. Obviously, with 8 of the twelve months locked, loading all twelve months at once is now out of the equation, while uploading one month at a time not only quadruples the amount of work I have to do, it still doesn't address the fact that the numbers in the preceding 8 months are completely wrong.

Fucking bastards.

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