There was one other interesting situation with regard to this particular company. Shortly after that event, they shut down that particular camp, as the falling have been completed, but the arrangement for the helicopter yarding had not been done. The accountant for the company decided that he wanted to be a programmer, and computer operator, as they were putting in a new accounting system. So, as I had been acting as a bookkeeper at the camp, it was decided that I would fill his position as accountant, at least in so far as posting payments to relevant accounts, in the head office in Squamish, while he drove every day to Surrey, to the head office of the company that owned the logging company, in order to play around with the computer.
This meant that rather than living in the logging camp, I was back in Vancouver. And I was driving from Vancouver to Squamish everyday, on the old Sea-to-Sky Highway. Now it was a lot of fun driving the old Sea-to-Sky Highway, before they ruined it for the 2010 Olympics, but it still took an hour and a half to drive. And, of course, there was the fact that they were no longer paying my room and board. So, noting all of these facts, and the fact that the secretary in the office in Squamish wanted to go to a four-day work week, plus the fact that they had a crew working in Squamish that needed to be sent off early in the morning and checked in at night, we worked out that I would count my driving time as work time, I would have three hours of driving time per day, and ten hours of office time per day, in order to cover the needs of the office. The secretary would switch from an eight-hour day to a ten-hour day, and work four days a week. We thought that this addressed a number of needs, and was a pretty good arrangement.
Unfortunately, while it worked out very well for several weeks, when the accountant was made aware of it, he decided that he couldn't stand the thought of somebody working only three days a week. However, he could see that it was unfair to ask me, in addition to losing room and board, to add all that travel time, and so my travel time was still to be included as work time. Unfortunately, this meant that there really wasn't an awful lot of time to cover the office for the secretary, and therefore she was back to working five days a week, and the company was back to not having anyone to send the work crew off in the morning, and check them back in at night. The inefficiencies caused by people who are looking to make work more efficient.
(While I was working as the accountant, I had to post various bills to various accounts. This involved a fair amount of detective work, since nobody ever noted what a particular bill was for. I therefore ran into the fact that the owners of the company were writing off an awful lot of personal expenses, that had absolutely nothing to do with the company's operations and business, and were hiding them in a variety of the accounts within the company.)
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