Happy New [fiscal] Year!

Well, here it is... 1 October. I survived my first fiscal year-end with the Comptroller Department. And it was kind of exciting.

I have to admit, I wasn't nearly as rushed or stressed as the people I work with because I'm not part of the 'funding document process'. My time was spent addressing any IT issues (computer, network, server, database, etc.). I can't always fix the problems, but I can speak the techie language of the people who can. It relieves that burden from the folks who need to focus on the actual financial work.

I also had several people ask me to query various databases so that they could see 'where we were'. How many receipts were run by such-and-such-a-program that haven't been cleared yet? How many type 'F' transactions don't have an associated type 'R' transaction? What was our total revenue for FY09? Now divide it up between THIS kind of funding and THAT kind of funding. Create a list of orphan records based on whether or not they have a particular code. Etc, etc, etc.

This is my favorite part of my job. I love running SQL statements against databases...AKA 'talking to' the databases. Sometimes it takes me some time to figure out how to tie multiple tables together or even multiple databases together. But when I finally figure it out, victory! It's like working a crossword puzzle or a brain-teaser. I enjoy the challenge and the subsequent feeling of success. And I find that the people asking for the data are THRILLED when I give them the results. Without the ability to speak 'SQL', it could/would take them hours to get the same list.

I left the office at about 8:45pm, after working 12 hours. And it wasn't bad at all. We were busy much of the day, so it seemed to fly by! But I have to say, sometimes it was entertaining to field phone calls where our customers were calling during the 11th hour to request near-miracles. I know it was stressful for some of my co-workers who had to process those requests. To me, it was just unreal. It's amazing how much work is done on the last day of the fiscal year. Of course, some of it HAS to wait until that late date. But I'm sure some of it did NOT. But every call that came in was super-crazy-urgent...and was usually followed by an email and two more phone calls to check the status of their request. Sometimes it felt like we were spending as much time updating the status to the customers as we were doing the work. If we could have gotten the phones to stop ringing, we probably could have gotten things done faster.

At any rate, the work is mostly done. Halleluiah! And Happy New Year!