Vic Glowacki is a retired professional with over 30 years of accounting and finance experience in government and the private sector. Below he reflects on mental wellness in the workplace.
It is
kind of ironic that our first workshop date for Fall 2015 term would occur on
September 29. To those who have read any of my previous articles, that date may
not mean much, if anything. To many, it means almost the end of the month and
to companies almost the end of the calendar quarter. However, for me, it marks
the very first date that I began my career in earnest. The year may have been
1981 as opposed to something more recent. One must remember that at that time
we were just beginning to use the radical new instrument in the world of
business applications: a computer! It was not even called a computer in those
days; it was called a CRT, which stands for cathode ray tube. What follows is
likely to be written in a memoir style, but I find it easier to write that way
as opposed to my traditional narrative.
To put matters into perspective, there were no such terms in my day as internet, email, smartphone, social media, and similar names we find common today. The common terms we had were mainframe, spreadsheets by hand, and batch posting. We did not have a “fax” machine. We had the terminal, a calculator, a touch-tone phone which still used the 312 area code for the entire Chicago metro area, and similar office tools. I had mentioned in a previous article that my first day of training was with a woman whom I had assumed would show me the procedures and be part of our finance team; she was about to go on maternity leave as I had no idea I would be replacing her after the agreed upon three days of my routines. I sat in a cubicle with a wall about five feet high, the cubicles were in groups of four. At that time, only one other station opposite of me was in use of the four during those days. The other two were occupied about two years later. As with almost any procedure that one is shown the first time, there were occasional interruptions, such as someone introducing themselves to me and whose name I was likely to forget. There was the President, whom I had to be sure to remember, two Vice Presidents, their secretaries and the personnel manager and controller and a few others who occupied out second floor administrative offices. In the afternoon, when things were a little less hectic, I was shown the lower level where the service bays and other company people were busy. I certainly would not remember their names at that time wither, but would in about three months after I got my bearings. Perhaps the quirkiest feeling that I got from starting on September 29 was the fact that the company’s business year ended on September 30. The only benefit that came was that I would get two weeks’ vacation my first year instead of one if I began on October 1. Thank goodness that the 29th was on a Monday. Because my trainer was looking over my shoulder for the entries that occurred on those last two business days of the year, that ended without a serious blemish on my record. As mentioned previously in another article, however, when the trainer left, I suppose the reader would surmise that I fell into a deep panic and forgot all the training; at that time, I was not much for taking notes and struggled to recall all that I had learned. You would be right. Oh, I logged on and got the password without a hitch, found the main menu and knew what program to do the entries in and that was about it. Doing something rather basic as entering a customer payment to a specific invoice was not too troublesome but entering multiple items with credits really confounded me.
The controller was the only person I could turn to since we did not have a supervisor position at the time and only an accounts payable person in another area was our finance department. Since it was the year-end and reports were in demand from the controller, all he could do was encourage me to go on and we would have time to review the weak spots. Needless to say, that did not happen until the end of October when month end was way out of balance between cash and receivable balances. Of course, the other challenge that I had to control was the phone ringing and getting acquainted with the female secretaries at the other branch offices. All were as different as night and day and I was the little guppy, as it were. Yes, they seemed like the sharks. At that point, he asked me to come out with him on a Saturday morning outside the office environment and we had a rather low key but intense review of what I did right and what was wrong and what to correct; one could call it a sort of mentoring session. What it came down to was a matter of me setting up some sub worksheets to help me in my daily balancing. Mind you, Excel was about ten years away. I replied that I would set these things up for the following month of November until I got the hang of it; he could get rid of me if I failed in my efforts. No such thing happened. I not only balanced to the penny during November but also balanced every month for the next five years. I also found time, as a result of this development of efficiency, to make some collection calls based on our new-fangled document called aged receivables, which lists customer balances beyond the 30 day stated terms. I would also enter correspondence with whom I spoke with regarding their account. That is another skill I had to develop over time: people skills. It was hard enough with the satellite secretaries but much harder with actual customers because you never knew who was on the other end of the phone or what their temperament was to our company. Another hard day after that was our controller left the company after I was there one year. One never knows what the new person is like or if we will be reinventing the wheel. He did bring a supervisor on board, however. By coincidence, he happened to live a few miles from my home; on bad winter days, we took turns driving each other to work and I got to know another side of him, which was another people skill acquisition.
Perhaps I should insert a few lines regarding the type of entries that I dealt with. Keep in mind that we are talking about 1981, not 2015. The idea of entering cash receipts was something revolutionary in our time; not many companies, even the large well known ones, did not even have a main frame or operating system of any kind. It was not in their budgets for the post part. The entries were receipts for services we billed mostly for repairs or install of new radio equipment. As suck, the dollars entered were not especially large in themselves; the larger figures came in what was called batch entries, which I usually limited to 30 to making balancing checks and receipts easier. After the entries were posted for the day, we mailed our checks to the bank, some 30 miles away. We localized about two years later. The checks were sent directly to our office; the lockbox concept, for me, came with my next position, some seven years later where an agent for the bank emptied the lockbox and deposited the checks for us; we would receive the check stubs and batch totals in the next day mail. It was there that I first saw a check for one million dollars! In that case, I was entrusted with taking that bunch of checks to the bank downtown on my own; I asked about bonding if I was in an accident; I was told ‘don’t worry.” I secretly said, “Yeah, right.” I had two subsequent trips at the position. Toward the end of my time there, we changed banks to the one in downtown Milwaukee; I had to drive that up there courier style, for which I was reimbursed for gas and mileage. The executives seemed a bit nervous to do it themselves, but as that old song goes, my veins were “as cold as ice.” No problem; they gave me the rest of the afternoon off upon my arrival; that was just great, namely drive home another 22 miles, after doing about 100 just before. That last rambling is for another article.
Why am I writing all this? My main point is to say that based on my mentoring of students last school year and reading through their resumes and realizing many had gone through one internship program of one sort or another, I wanted to share what a first day was like for me in the actual workplace on a more permanent basis. I grant you that the graduate to be will have a much easier time of it than I had some thirty four years ago what with the tools we have today. However, what remains constant is the fact that procedures have not really changed all that much over the years. Someone still has to show the new person the essentials and the new person still has to perform them on a consistent basis. The “how to do it” is certainly different, but the end result remains the same. As I have said many times before, accuracy still counts for something.
To connect with Vic and other ASK Mentors like him, visit http://ask.depaul.edu/
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