NAY: Expense Reports Involving Foreign Transactions

Okay, let's be honest here. (And by "let's," I mean me.) This is kind of a lame NAY. The truth is that (a) I wanted to do a "nay," and (b) I wanted that nay to be "Hillary Clinton's Campaign" since her supporters so pissed me off at the DNC thing on Saturday. But, then I heard that she might concede the nomination tonight, so I thought that was an utterly unclassy thing to do. And I am nothing if not classy. (Shut up, Allison.)

So, here I was without my beloved "nay." What's a bored girl with no willpower to work to do? Look around her desk for inspiration! I realized that I need to do expense reports for my bosses and that some of these involved set visits to Canada ("Boston, California"), where film incentives are high and french fries suck, if a recent e-mail from my boss is to be believed. One would think that with all of the French Canadians, the fries would be off the hizzle. But no. Then again, he's currently in Toronto, not Montreal.

Expense reports involving foreign transactions suck for a myriad of reasons. First, the system my company uses requires the user to convert everything, which means entering the exchange rate. This is a problem because the exchange rate changes every day. (This quote, of course, makes me think of Gabby Hoffman's line from Sleepless in Seattle regarding the price of airfare to New York. "Nobody knows! It changes practically every day!") Then, when I look up the exchange rate for a particular date on the Internet, it never matches up with the transaction amount shown on the credit card statement, forcing me to do convoluted mathematics to determine the correct exchange rate.

The second major problem with these things is that one has to wait on the credit card statement to arrive before processing said foreign expenses. That can lead to a huge delay in reimbursement for airfare, hotel, and overpriced lackluster french fries in the airport. Plus, they add their own little foreign transaction fee, which must be accounted for on the expense report. All in all, just one of these little puppies can take up two hours of my day. That's two hours I could be spending on status reports, answering phones, making sure that every person one of my bosses has ever met with, had lunch with, or spoken to on the phone is in his Outlook Contacts, and periodically checking the Television Without Pity message boards for any updates on the upcoming X-Files movie. (Did I just type that out loud?)

Again, I recognize that this is a lame nay. I promise to exercise more discretion in choosing my topics of bitchiness in the future. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a date with a Xerox machine and a dozen restaurant receipts. Oh goodie for me.