energy,
Scary isn't it?
Just remember the operative phrase was considering....
In my experience, the auditors (registrar's) are all in all a pretty good bunch to work with. I made it my policy early on in the game to use their experience and audits to my advantage. I've never looked at an audit as anything other than an opportunity to improve the system. I have, on ocassion, "stood my ground and faced 'em down", but over-all not all that often. I really don't think they (ISO auditors) are as bad as you fear. I bet you have nightmares of the Grim Reaper with a clipboard, don't you?
I've gone through over a dozen surveillance audits, and 2 certification audits, one for ISO '94 version, one for QS, and probably 100 customer specific (before we were ISO) certifications. Believe me, the customer audits were by far the worst. They all want you to do business how they want you to do business. The auditors are often untrained, unobjective, and outright opinionated. At least the registrars I have worked with seem to have auditors that basically think the same.
Of course, as one of my co-workers once said, "who in their right mind, would even try to argue with you, unless he had a death wish?" Keep on keepin' on. It ain't so bad!