An Intro into my world

Hi, may name is Chris and I am an accountant.
I wish I could say I was something more exciting, but life threw me…accountancy.

I wish I could say I was an adrenalin pumping corporate animal, fighting tooth and nail as I climbed the corporate ladder, slaying the weak and taking over the strong with nail biting hostile antics.

Alas, no, I am a partner in a small accounting practice in a small village called Kloof.

My father is also an accountant, (are you picking up a trend here?), yet being older and wiser, has an accounting practice in the city of Durban, some 50km’s away.

Family dinner is riveting stuff, normally signified by my mother consuming large quantities of gin and tonic in an effort to fight off the urge to either swallow razor blades and scream wildly or simply expire due to terminal boredom.

And yes, contrary to popular belief, accounting is boring. Not boring in a Sunday, what shall we do today boring. Boring in a mind numbing, soul destroying way. Accounting actually takes boredom to a level where the idea of slamming ones head repeatedly in the door becomes appealing as a welcome reprieve from the tedium of moving numbers arbitrarily around on paper whilst inventing weak excuses to justify their existence.

Now if that’s not bad enough, in order for us to exist, we need clients. Most practices unfortunately do, and this can be seen as the biggest drawback of public practice. Clients. They have been put on this earth to challenge both my patience and my sanity. We have 957 of them, at last count. This means that every year we need to talk to each one of them. We need to be nice to them, so they will give us money. We need to listen to their mindless diatribe and laugh at their jokes, in all the right places. We need to commiserate with them when they are down to their last 100 million or celebrate with them as they march forward building their capitalistic empires. We congratulate them, we stroke their egos. We are their mentors, their confidantes and their confessor. We are the janitors of the business world.

And boy, can we attract them, they swarm in like flies, the unfaithful, the unscrupulous and the greedy. They embrace the 7 deadly sins with disturbing exuberance portraying their weaknesses like virtues.

And there we stand before this onslaught, directing them like point cops at an intersection, as they bombard us in person, by phone, by fax, by skype, by email and yes, even by snailmail.

To help deal with them as they come in waves, we need help, not the help that you subcontract from calm professionals who ask you about your childhood, but help in the form of staff.
We attract strange people, I do not know why. We end up with colourful people, people who may look normal, but are just that little bit off-centre. I have never quite worked out why our office works like some sort of hybrid between as set off Ally McBeal and Boston legal and the more sanity I try and bring the more eccentric things get. I can only attribute it to the fact that personalities undergo change when immersed in vast quantities of boredom.

I am also the only male amongst 16 woman, a heavy cross to bear but an amazing insight into woman in their natural habitat. I am unsure if it is natural for a Male to have such vision into their rather explicit worlds and I am torn between the desire to push my fingers in my ears and hum loudly or to give in to my morbid curiosity and partake with a well timed ‘reaalllly?’

I never learn as I am more inclined to go with the latter, a decision I usually live to regret. In an effort to curb the amount of free speech that bombards my senses, I have put a large silver pig in pride of place, in the office. I call it the ‘TMI’ (To Much Information) jar. When I deem information to have been overshared then I direct the offending individual to put money in the pig, much the same concept as a swear jar. The idea is that when the jar is full I will use it to buy large quantities of alcohol in an effort to try and drink these overshared images from my mind.

I would love to say the idea has worked, the only problem is that people have embraced the pig as a ‘licence to share’ and now they place money in advance of overshare, and then claim a days immunity on the back of it.

The pig is big, and the pig is almost full. I fear this will genuinely drive me to drink.

So this is how I spend my days, desperately holding onto the tattered remnants of my sanity, portraying the image of an accountant but failing miserably. At the end of the day though, I work with good (albeit strange) people and we laugh a lot. When you break it all down I guess, not that much else matters.