A day in the Life of an Analyst

“Morning shows the day”
- African Proverb

While the sages of Africa are right when they observed that the morning is a portent for what the day holds, it does not always hold true for an analyst, at least one who has thrown his/her lot with a big four professional services firm. Perhaps the day’s tasks could have been drawn up by the backlog of unattended tasks of the previous day. Even at that you still aren’t sure what to expect as the shape of the day, as they say, lies in the laps of the gods.

Yeah, it had been sketched out the previous day when you left the office at around 10pm, yes, 10pm and you still had a number of deliverables yet unattended to.

Deliverables! That’s enough thought to cloud your already addled brain as you commute to work in the morning. If you are like me and you commute to work by public transport, you have enough to brood over amidst the inane chatter of other passengers: logistics to be made for the team, research to be done, slides to be prepared, excel spreadsheet to be populated, interviews with clients to be confirmed, interview notes to be typed ad nauseam.

And then you saunter into the pool or into your workstation in your client’s office (if you are on an engagement) primed for the day’s task. While you are setting up your system, you are asked by your team leader for the update on research he requested some minutes before he left you to stew in your juice the previous night. You remember the bile that welled up within, the naked revulsion, the sickening thought that you would have to research alone into the night and make available facts that would only help in clarifying a few grey areas. Nothing more! He left you demanding feedback the next day and of course, you knew it would be an evaluation issue if you didn’t deliver.

I am still on it, you tell him. I scoured the internet but my research was stalled when the security guard told me he needed to shut down and leave for home. You are not sure if your explanation sits down well with him. You wish you didn’t care but you do. And you hate to think that you have to start another day on another fruitless search. But you have to deliver.

Other senior members start to demand for updates on assigned tasks and they are beginning to drive you nuts. You must maintain calm and resilience, as it one of your goals on which you would be evaluated at the end of the engagement, at the end of the financial year and you can’t afford to be rated anything less than a SP-sound performance, the shade notwithstanding.

You are already adept at multitasking. You started honing that skill three months into your stint in the firm. Your phone beeps and then a senior associate calls to enquire about the whereabouts of an engagement file. The less-than-pleasant experience you had on her watch floods back to you as you try to visualize the file cabinet where you had angrily flung the files after three long days of painstaking filing. You can hear her hand rummaging through the cabinet now. She says there have been some amendments to the final deliverable and that she would have you drop by the office en route home to effect the corrections, print out the document and file the revised copy. The partner must see it the next day and she is off to her client site.

It is 11am already and you are off with a senior associate to take down note for an interview with a client. This client senior manager is particularly garrulous, always veering off the tangent. And gosh, you have to capture his disjointed response in words. If you had your way you would have him sacked not ‘counselled out’ to use the dreaded parlance of the firm. The interview stretches into two hours and by the time you are done, hunger beckons. You have lunch at the client office amidst the chatter of the client staff dining in the room. You loath the idle prattle that fills the room and wish you could swap places with them.

You do all the work and they earn fatter paychecks than you do. That sickens you. Their work is a sinecure for the most part and they badger you every so often asking to know if you are paid overtime for the long hours you spend post COB.

You settle down to work after lunch, willing yourself not to open your Yahoo mail and Facebook as you know your myriad friends doing less demanding jobs are waiting to chat you up. You stare blankly into your system for close to thirty minutes and you were jolted back into reality by the arrival of the manager. He has come around to review the team’s work.

Time check 5pm.

It’s close of business but work has just started.

Adedotun Eyinade, an Analyst at a Big Four Audit firm, blogs at http://tinwatinwa.blogspot.com/

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