I finally got the honor of being chosen to be the person acting as the tip of the spear, if you will, on an audit. I have been able to avoid it for almost 25 years, but I guess everyone gets it eventually. I was notified about two weeks ago by our director when she sent me something like 25 Powerpoints, to which I jokingly responded that I was a little too busy enjoying my time off due to Covid-19 and my days were too filled with Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Go. She did not appreciate my attempt at humor, coming back with a "We are paying you, aren't we?" I quickly fell in line, some people don't have a sense of humor.
I tried my best and made a plan to go over one or two of those Powerpoints a day, but man, there isn't anything more boring than reading instructions to a job I've been doing all my life. I honestly read one, which covered our electronic pipettes, they give you a measured amount of liquid into your container. This one was over how we check their accuracy, we send them off to get calibrated once a year, but do another internal check every six months. We actually have a guy assigned to take care of stuff like this, so me reading it made little sense. I ended up taking a nap and that pretty much happened every time I tried reading a new Powerpoint.
When I went back to work I felt better after asking around and nobody had really read any of the Powerpoints, so I wasn't the only one. My trainer put me at ease saying they aren't going to ask you stuff you don't know, more than likely it will just have to do with what we do every day. This took the stress of it away, but I still went and skimmed about 20 of the Powerpoints this past weekend, early in the morning when everyone was asleep and late at night when Wife went up to the bedroom. I was trying not to let it ruin my weekend, but it still did. I was worried I would have to regurgitate straight information from a random Powerpoint, but in the end, it went pretty much as my trainer said it would. She said she was chosen the last time to do the audit, but also mentioned that it is different every time.
I was told to show up at 4:00pm, which I arrived probably by 3:30pm today. I broke out some pants which I keep for special occasions and a nice Polo style shirt, so I wouldn't look like a Dummy. It took quite a while for the auditor to show up but she was quite nice and not scary at all. She basically asked me to go through the procedure of starting a job from the beginning and taking her through the process. It couldn't have been better, this is all I do, so I felt very comfortable explaining the process even with the Director and my Supervisor hanging out in the background along with my trainer. I went through most of the whole process, taking almost an hour to get through everything, and in the end I passed it off to my trainer because I only do so much. Even my Supervisor got involved towards the end as she wanted very specific data on the condition of the tool and the qualification procedure of our scales and other stuff I just don't do.
After the lady left, our Supervisor said we did great and to relax and take a deep breath. I am glad it is over even if it didn't turn out to be as bad as I was building it up in my head.
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