YOU KNOW YOU'RE AN AUDITOR WHEN...

You can't leave home without a hole-punch and a week's supply of staples... even if you're just going to the supermarket.

You make jokes about how boring it must be to be an actuary, but secretly you just wish you were earning that much money and would like to date one.

You have stayed in Premier Inns and Travelodges the length and breadth of the country... and you can talk for hours about their relative merits.

Your favourite words in the whole wide world are "no further work proposed".

You wake up on Monday mornings and wonder if this might be the week you actually discover a fraud.

You don't need to pay for a gym membership as you get a full work-out every day from lifting your case of files.

Hot-desking means that you get to your own office an hour before you start work so that you don't end up sitting on the floor.

When random accountancy magazines arrive at your home you start flicking to the back to read who's been disciplined, but halfway through you can't help but be distracted by that *really* interesting article on share options.

You have on occasion cried because a balance sheet didn't balance.

At some point in your life you have either been criticised or criticised someone else for stapling a page in the wrong corner, failing to underline a title, or hole-punching inconsistently.

You become aggressive if a colleague tries to steal your tippex mouse.

You are intimately acquainted with the staff in the audit request department of RBS, but you've never managed to ring HSBC without being put through to a robot who doesn't speak very good English.

You have no idea whether you're issuing the auditor's report or the auditors' report but the good news is you know your manager won't know either.

Your response to every question is, "How did we do it last year?"

Lunch is that inconvenient fifteen minutes where you can only type with one hand because you're holding a sandwich in the other.

You've got lost on every industrial estate within a twenty mile radius of your home.

You wonder why if you do the work of the tax department, you don't get paid their salary too.

When people at parties ask what you do for a living, you prefer to tell them you work in the financial services sector.

You don't think it seems futile to work your arse off for a week in order that a partner can issue a report, the outcome of which was already set in stone before you started.

You spend Mondays trying to obtain the payroll file to find out what your client's FD is earning, and Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays moaning because he gets twice what you do and he's crap.

You have irreparably broken at least one client photocopier.

You wish your clients could be more imaginative with their year end dates, and then you might be able to go skiing in February.

Nothing in your life is ever reasonable, it only *appears* so.

There's one week every year you always try to book a training course, but your manager sees through it and makes you do the audit from hell anyway.

Every time you are handed a piece of paper, you have to fight an uncontrollable urge to write the date and your initials at the top.

You know the collection of paper in your locker and the collection of files on your hard drive are breaking an ISA, but you've still not come to terms with the fact that you need to destroy them.

When your acquaintances make excuses about something, you won't believe them unless they can provide supporting documentation.

You're totally anal about backing up after that one time you forgot and had to spend your evening recreating the revenue section from memory.

You don't generally achieve anything on Mondays except to establish where the toilets are and discover that reserves don't work.

You're sure your firm has a Corporate Finance department, but you've never spoken to any of them and you don't know what they do.

You periodically think about moving to industry, before remembering that you have no idea what management accountants do either.

You thank your clients profusely for providing you with pieces of paper which they're paying you to ask them to provide.

You repeatedly have to tell your friends that you don't spend the whole day adding things up. Only half the day, honestly.

You are accomplished at counting small, pointless pieces of metal or plastic without questioning what they are.

You have perfected the art of smiling politely whilst people tell you things you don't understand and don't need to know.

You worry about getting a Vitamin D deficiency because you sometimes don't see daylight for weeks on end as your client has allocated you a desk in the windowless stationery cupboard.

If you can identify with any of those comments, congratulations; you have one of the most exciting jobs in the world!