Brother take a seat and let me tell you about the worst dumpster fire of an engagement I’ve ever been on.
It was in 2020 right as COVID was hitting. I was a newly promoted senior who had just lived out of a hotel for 7 months on a travel engagement. I had heard ‘whispers’ of a client that was falling apart but managed to stay out of it for a couple months UNTIL I noticed my schedule was completely filled to the brim with this client.
In order to prepare for the engagement, I reached out to several peers to see what’s up. I learned that:
So it was off to a great start
On my first day I learned I would be assisting a brand new associate with his walkthroughs. Keep in mind: I am an IT Auditor who left Financial Auditing on purpose.
My first question to the association is “What’s your agenda and what items are you covering?”
He just goes “I don’t have an agenda and I don’t need one” (side note - this kid was drinking the Kool-Aid so hard he bragged about his his relationship almost ended over this engagement)
So I’m like “ya ok this is gonna a suck” and it 100% did suck. Kid was all over the place, didn’t know what he was asking for and why he was asking for, and it was probably the worst walkthrough I’ve ever seen. After the walkthrough he goes “so you took down notes for all of that right?” And I was honest with him. I go “honestly no. That was all over the place and didn’t make sense. I need the recording to validate my notes” and that’s when he goes “We’re probably not going to get the recording. The client doesn’t know how to use their own software.”
As mentioned at the top, the client does recordings of meetings like Zoom and Teams. Well, instead of using Zoom or Teams, the client had their ego offended and our stupid fucking idiot director ended up okaying the use of their software. Well guess what? They didn’t even know how to use it. So now there’s no access to this recording because the client is literally too stupid to know what their own product does.
The kid associate then rats me out to the same shitty director mentioned above because “I let him down” so I ended up getting berated in front of 20 of my peers in the next meeting. Keep in mind this has been 24 hours since I joined the engagement. He accused me of playing video games and Minecraft which is why follow-ups from that meeting didn’t get documented.
I called him up that day and let him know how his behavior was inappropriate. His only words were “I’m sorry you feel that way”
The engagement ended up being billed like $5,000,000 (I am not joking - they brought on anyone and everyone they could to finish the audit) and in order to get the number down to what was quoted the firm removed everyone’s hours from the month of May and June from that engagement and converted it to “non-billable” / admin.
The firm lost the client and I left about 2 weeks after that.
If you’re reading this Dylan and Cristiano - u fucking suck!
Tl;dr: