I feel as though he's documenting my life...

The next time someone asks me what I do for a living, rather than give them the big speech that "..I provide reasonable assurance that the Company's financial statements are free of material misstatement...," I am going to had them this Dilbert cartoon. I will smile sweetly and say, "I try to validate Dilbert's fake numbers."

A perfect example of this happened this morning. Currently I am working on a small pharmaceutical company, and I approached the VP of Finance about how he calculated the Accrued Bonus Liability. I watched as he awkwardly maneuvered through spreadsheet after spreadsheet, desperately searching for the magic number that I was looking for, and tragically finding anything but. I felt a little uncomfortable making a grown man, a VP for Christ's sake, get so nervous, so rather than stare intently at his screen and wait, I let my eyes casually wander around the room. They spotted the things that I expect from a VP of Finance's office... huge window, industry-related magazines, motivational posters, various schwag collected from conferences... My eyes then spotted something familiar...Dilbert's strangely phallic striped tie. I strained my eyes to read the cartoon. It said, " I didn't have any accurate numbers, so I just made this one up." I looked back at the VP, sweating and scrolling, knowing damned well that he was not going to find any support for the $142,000 in accrued bonuses that he had booked....and I thought, "You dipshit....if you're going to make up numbers, at least keep your Dilbert Cartoon tucked away from the Auditors!"