Work has been stressful these past two weeks. We’re auditing an oil refinery at the request of the EPA. On the first day, I showed up at the refinery, expecting that like always, someone would tell me what to do. The other members of the audit team arrived with handwritten notes, highlighted and annotated licences and policies, and the ISO 14001 standard. Slowly, a lightbulb brightened over my head. Oh dear. Maybe I should have done some preparation.

Three weeks into my first full time job, I had found myself in the deep end. Some crazy people had entrusted me with responsibility.

“Joan,” they said, “You have to audit licence conditions 2.2f and 2.2d.”

I thought, “By myself? Won’t you tell me what to do? Micromanage me, please! I’m not ready!”

Two days later, the job manager, Miriam (little older than me), found me sitting amongst a pile of procedures and reports, with 17 documents open on the PC. She looked at my bewildered expression.

“Joan, do you know what you have to do?”

“No,” I said in a small voice. “I… I need a criteria sheet. I need someone to tell me how many pages I can write and if I should use tables and dot points or paragraphs…”

“Oh!” She was surprised. “I’m sorry. You’re smart, I keep thinking of you as my equal. Don’t worry, I’ll explain it to you.”

I ended up writing this thing, which I thought was too long, too random, too oblique. The day it was due, I found out that it was also probably too positive. That’s my problem — I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt. “Oh, operating a refinery is really complicated and I would never be able to understand the things you have to deal with. Those environmental management systems seem like a good effort. Big tick to you.” The oil company people were really nice to me and I believed (believe) them.

Then we spoke to the EPA and they told us all about the stupid, frustrating, environmentally detrimental actions of the oil company. “Oh dear,” I thought. “I’m a sucker. Back to the drawing board.”

I trawled through my report and deleted three of my nice unsubstantiated sentences. Suddenly, the tone of the whole report had changed. Hiding behind my benefits of the doubt was doubt. I had identified a whole bunch of gaps and problems already.

I had a great day today. The two lead auditors told me that they were impressed by my work. I’m happy, very happy that I haven’t let the team down.