The 2 essential lessons I’ve learned in life (and please don’t tell my wife) are:
- You cannot be an accountant if you can’t add.
- The difficulty of getting fired.
On a cold, rainy January morning I entered the portal of Hale and Company, Chartered Accountants of Maidenhead, England, with a demeanour of a prisoner resigned to serve his full sentence of five years. That sentence had been delivered by my mother. The previous summer I had failed high school and spent the last six months backpacking through southern Europe and the Middle East. While away, mum had wangled me a traineeship to become an accountant, through Sam, a family friend.
Hale and Co. spelt Doomsville for me. The firm operated out of an old Victorian house. Typical of that bygone era, I was escorted to the attic, where servants were once quartered. A dormer window provided the only light, as colourless as my fellow inmates—a stark contrast from the blazing sunlight of my recent travels. I stared at my damp paper bag of sandwiches, longing for my erstwhile daily meal of Manaish—a pizza of unleavened dough brushed with olive oil and sprinkled with sesame seeds and sumac, a lemony-tasting herb—the local poor man’s diet.
Overnight I had been shoved into a strait jacket of regimented, sedentary time.
Overburdened with a tedious, repetitive workload, I arrived at 9am; lunch at one; the office closed at five.
A year passed. I learned nothing but basic bookkeeping. Meanwhile, I had twice failed my first set of exams.
To hell with it. Why not quit and find something I really liked?
“Once you’re qualified, you have an open ticket to travel and work anywhere in the world,” Sam reminded me. That was the carrot.
I didn’t want to leave the firm as a failure. All my past misery suffered would been in vain. I would have to redo high school and start from scratch again. Why not spend a few years more and qualify? I thought about it constantly, always concluding that a larger, modern firm was the only answer.
It was back to Sam. “They won’t allow you to transfer. It would be a major embarrassment, considering you’re indentured for five years. If you hand in your notice, no other accountants will hire you for fear of offending our firm. They won’t fire you as it acknowledges failure on their part in training you.”
Fine advice, but prolonging my stay here would spell disaster, the same if I quit. The only answer was a transfer. How could Hale & Co. be convinced?
The obvious strategy was to make constant errors in my work.
“He’s lost his marbles,” became the common cry. But instead of agreeing to a transfer, they changed my workload. Joan, our receptionist was due for maternity leave. I was given her job for the time being.
One of my new tasks was to make bank deposits every afternoon. I lost one of three bank books. They gave me a briefcase to keep all the deposit books together. I lost the briefcase. The firm refused to fire me. I was now relegated to answering phone calls and reception work.
The following week, I heard the gerontic Mr. Hale coughing and spluttering like an old steam engine as he pounded down the stairs, appearing to miss a step by the sound of it. The whole town of Maidenhead must have heard him curse. What was the old codger trying to do? Practise a complex ballet movement? The founding partner almost broke the reception door down. In his haste, he had forgotten to turn the handle.
“You…you…” he kept repeating. “What are those workmen doing in our parking lot?”
“They’re delivering stuff. Building materials, I think. Why? Something wrong?” I asked innocently.
As part of its service, the firm acted as the registered office of its clients. All invoices carried the registered office address, as well as its business address. The workmen had arrived brandishing a delivery note displaying both addresses.
Mr. Hale swallowed what air he could press into his collapsing lungs. “They aren’t for us you imbecile. They’re for a client. They’ve got the wrong address.”
With that, the chief charged headlong out of the room and hurtled down the steps leading to the parking lot. I followed suit, not wanting to miss one bit of the action.
The once lovely long garden of Hale House had long since been asphalted over to accommodate the partners’ and clients’ cars.
As Mr. Hale entered the fray, the workers were finishing their unloading. Stacks upon stacks of corrugated iron sheets now formed an impregnable wall several feet high, blocking the exit way.
“Take them back immediately,” the chief bellowed.
They stared at him in disbelief. Their foreman spoke up.” Sorry mate, do you know how long it took us to unload that lot. Now you want us to cart it back. Besides, your lad confirmed the address and told us where to put it,” pointing at me.
The next day, I found a sealed envelope on my desk. It contained a letter of transfer.
I still have that letter today. It hangs framed in gilt on the wall beside four certificates of international accounting accreditations, a world away.
