#41 Sending out E-mails at Odd Hours
Jun 24th, 2009 by pfi
Accountants work a lot. This much is known. Since accountants don’t sleep much, this entails a lot of irregular rituals – getting coffee 3 times a day, never working out, and staying past the late night cleaning crew.
Since accountants are always “working” throughout the day, they are constantly making phone calls, sending out e-mails, opening PDF’s, etc. The 2nd one in this list deserves special recognition.
If you are working with an accountant, you should expect an e-mail before you arrive at your desk. You should expect phone calls or in-person visits in the morning for more questions. More e-mails will arrive throughout the early evening requesting things. Accountants take the simple concept of question & answer to the next level.
If someone sends an e-mail at 7AM, it shows that they were there working early, right? Well how about another e-mail to their team at 9pm? That shows they were working late. Accountants manage to continuously send e-mails past midnight, past 2AM, and again before people show up in the office. In fact, accountants rarely see what is known as the sun.
This is the game of one-upmanship that accountants play to show their supervisors, coworkers, peers, etc. that they work harder (read: longer) than everybody else. Why send an e-mail at 8:30PM when you can send one at 11:23PM and show everybody your dedication.
Accountants are amazing at this, because they will pretend that nobody notices the time stamp on their e-mails. Saturday at 2PM? Sunday at 11:57PM? Accountants act shocked when they are asked how late they worked, but deep down secretly, they have a self-important attitude because they were in the office at midnight documenting something while you were out enjoying life.
So the next time you see an accountant, ask them how late they were working in the office last night. This will allow them to give you a nonchalant reply. You should act surprised and then amazed. By commending them for working so hard, this will improve your relationship with the accountant by more than you can imagine.
so true!
Spot on!
Hahahaha, so so true. I’ve been guilty of this all week.
I draft my emails at 5 pm and have them sent at 1 or 2 am…to give the appearance of working late without actually needing to work late.
Sometimes it’s done out of necessity though. I recently had to send an email to the client at 10:34 p.m. not because I wanted to do that. It’s just because I couldn’t find any time to do it after I got home.
I get 4 am emails from my seniors pretty often. This is pretty true… only I think some of them actually pull all nighters.
A director at my former job LOVE to send emails at 2 a.m. because she could not manager her time propertly (talked too much BS during work hours about her kids, her husbands, her sister’s health problems)!
I wish I could say this isn’t true, but I think through the timing of every email I send. I am hoping that someone will notice that I am working hard and be recognized for it. In this very competitive environment to get to the next level, this type of behavior is required just to “keep up”
Please. Oh noooo, emails at odd hours… save us!
Do I sense a little investment banker envy? (I’ve got to pull long hours at my cushy Deloitte job to satisfy this inferiority complex!)
i’m an accounting student and this one really is true. I save my emails until after midnight because thats when i really feel like sending emails..
I’m doing it right now! Working while everyone else is asleep is the only way to actually get any work done.
Ah the memories. My manager used to do this all the time haha. But i’d do the same back at him so it looked like we were both working hard.
Fucking prick threw me under the bus though and i got fired.
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