Signing Off

We handle billions of dollars a day, every day the market is open, shares of mutual funds, variable rate securities, buy low-sell high. It comes as no surprise that the people who work here, then, have mastered passing the buck.

We have checklists for every procedure. Daily checklists for each fund, a daily checklist for the group, checklists for releasing funds, a nightly email checklist, monthly checklists for reinvesting, budget checklists for each budget, because the primary operating guideline here is “cover your own ass.”

Managers aren’t happy until they have a checklist in place for every procedure they could possibly be responsible for, a checklist they can distribute to their employees delegating responsibility, but more importantly, culpability. They’re not happy until they can say “It wasn’t my fault, it was Tom’s job to review the checklist.”

I’m in charge of “the daily checklist.” There are twenty-three items on the checklist that need to get done every day. Six of the items on the checklist need to be checked off, and then signed off by a manager. Three of those items are completed every day by a manager.

So this is where it gets a little ridiculous. My job is to ask hypermanager if he emailed certain fund information to a certain guy, like he does every day, check it off, and then give him the checklist to so he can sign off that I confirmed the email was sent.

Heaven forbid I forget to place a checkmark next to something. The wrath of hypermanager will descend upon me. Never mind that whatever I didn’t check off was completed, or that it has never been missed, ever, because we do it every day. Never mind that everything on the list was completed daily, without fail, before hypermanager decided we needed a checklist for it. If I didn’t check it off that list, if that implies I didn’t follow through on a task, that means it falls to hypermanager to make sure things were done right. That means he’s responsible – and the buck can’t stop there. No, corporate hath no annoyance like a culpable account manager.

I hate these checklists.
-t


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