Fran Hayden was in the final year of her bachelor of management studies (BMS) degree at the University of Waikato, where she had proved to be a high achiever. Fran was interested in a position with Dairy Engineering because of the opportunity to gain practical experience and the company's higher starting salary compared to the industry average. Fran sent her curriculum vitae to the company, and two weeks later she was invited to an interview with the chief accountant. She was surprised at the end of the interview to be offered the position of assistant cost accountant. Fran said she would like to think it over. Two weeks later, Fran had still not replied, so Rob telephoned her to ask if she was going to take the position. Although not totally convinced that she would enjoy the job, Fran decided to accept the offer.
The First Day at Work
Like many of her peers, Fran was glad to be leaving university after four years of study. She was looking forward to having money to spend as well as reducing her student debt. In order to ‘look the part’, she had gone further into debt to buy new corporate clothing. On reporting to the accounting department, she got her first shock in the real world. No one was expecting her! Even worse, she discovered that there was no vacancy for her in cost accounting. Instead, she had been assigned to management information systems (MIS). Mike, a coworker in MIS, accompanied Fran to the department, where she was introduced to two other colleagues, Tom and Adrian. They seemed to be a friendly bunch, as apparently was her boss, Peter Bruton, who explained that her main duties were to assist with compiling information for the monthly management report known as ‘Big Brother’. After two weeks, the time came to compile Big Brother. Fran found that her part was almost entirely clerical and consisted of photocopying, collating, binding, punching and stamping the pages of the report. She then had to hand-deliver