It’s that time of year for audit and tax professionals – busy season. Do you know where your backbone is?

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I have never worked an audit busy season. My life in professional services — at KPMG Consulting, BearingPoint, PwC and Jefferson Wells — was on the consulting side of the house. I have heard that the process of producing certified financial statements is a special kind of hell. It may be one that’s well suited for only the most extreme personality types – either sadists or masochists.

Picture the scene so many have you have described to me in delicious detail. A manager, or a senior associate toadie, cracks the whip until late in the evening on a crew of whimpering, subservient, gullible associates. The associates willingly take the punishment in hopes of pleasing their master or the assistant. This desire to please may be a permanent personality type or could be a masterful ruse intended to lull supervisors into complacency until it’s time to show your stuff directly to a partner.

Play the game well and everyone thinks you’re the “go-along get-along” type. That’s just the type that succeeds in Big 4 – a “team player” who’s really a guileless, masterful me-me-me.

I’ve worked implementing financial systems in the US and Latin America, first as a team member, then a manager, and then as the Managing Director. We worked hard and played hard. New enterprise software such as SAP, Oracle, or Arriba is typically implemented at the beginning of the fiscal year. That means many, many morals – numbing late nights at client sites, away from family, over the holidays in November/December or when the weather was warming and everyone else was drinking beer at baseball games.

I inhaled a lot of bad pizza and Chinese food in those days. Be careful of busy season bingeing. It not only adds pounds but gives you the perverse impression that there is some benefit to working zombie hours with a bunch of boring, anal retentive, paranoid, and strangely-attractive-in-the-dim-light accountants.

Yes, I’m mentioning the unmentionable: busy season romances. There’s been a lot of talk recently about Facebook fueling divorces.

From Techdirt:

You see stories of breakups exacerbated by Facebook, or jealousies created due to Facebook, but how prevalent is it really? According to one UK law firm, they went through recent divorce petitions and found around 20% of them cited Facebook in some manner.

Throw in Twitter, instant messaging, close proximity to the same people for weeks, lots of personal storytelling, eating spicy-saucy stuff together, nightly trips to the hotel bar and working for the audit firms is a recipe for romance – or relationship disaster. In my day, I saw lots of hook-ups amongst consulting professionals working on the same engagement. Some of those entanglements ended in divorce and few married or remarried as a result. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

But if you are the associate, avoid getting involved with anyone on your same team, your senior, or the manager. (I will leave the subject of affairs with the partner to a later post.) It’s just bad policy. It only ends in heartbreak. Or worse.
If you’re the manager, well, it may be tempting to pick one of the crew to be your “bitch” but I’m warning against that, also. A manager can deep-six a former SWB (Staff With Benefits) with the stroke of a performance appraisal pen, but that kind of behavior eventually comes back and bites you in the ass. And not in the good way. In the era of less hiring and smaller teams, it may be hard to get a fresh piece often enough to get the work done without having to do some yourself.

And that’s a real bitch.

Francine McKenna is the founder and Managing Editor of Re: The Auditors. She has more than 20 years experience in leadership positions in the Big 4 and in the professional services and consulting industry both in the U.S. and abroad. You can see all of her posts for GC here and can follow her on Twitter @retheauditors.