I often swear, for the sake of my dignity, that I am not an accountant, although I have been making my living at accounting for thirty years. Most of that time was occupied with important but lowly bookkeeping tasks, so if the usual distinction were made between bookkeeping and accounting, I must say that I am more of a bookkeeper than an accountant. And even when I held the title of Controller at several companies, I was little more than a highly paid, glorified bookkeeper.

None of the titles above suit my nature very well, or at least I like to think not, and that is certainly why I am not certified and knocking down six figures a year – if I were a CPA I would be far more ambitious than the homeless CPA I knew who was knocking down $12 per hour and sleeping in a Honolulu park. For one thing, an accountant’s status, no matter how much he earns, falls far short of my personal view of myself as a great artist, who would be a starving author, dancer and singer if he did not keep accounts on a part-time basis. I recall how pleased I was when a Manhattan CPA guffawed at the notion that I was an accountant after he saw me flying across a Lincoln Center stage in tights. 

My ideal avocation looks down on my real occupation, despite the fact that I am a Capricorn born in the Year of the Cock, which supposedly disposes me astrologically to scratching out a living in the barnyard one grain at a time. Mind you that I am not the only one who looks down on the servile task of counting other people’s corn for them and otherwise organizing their backroom messes – money has always had scatological implications.

No, I do not want to be perceived as the stereotypical accountant. I hesitate to enumerate the characteristics of the type here since I might be similarly judged by my long association with real accountants. I must admit that I felt personally offended by a recent book about occupations, written by a young man who was born rich, wherein he likened accountants to the “walking dead” i.e. zombies, claiming they became accountants because they were afraid to be anything else, and that’s why they wind up counting other people’s money instead of their own – never mind that some of them become millionaires, as that’s beside the denigrating point.    

Yes, I know, a few accountants have risen to the rank of CEO for major corporations, but let’s face the fact that accountants, no matter how far they distance themselves from vulgar bookkeeping – it used to be a noble profession in England – are pretty much looked down on by all ranks of society. It is a status symbol to have an accountant, but it is not cool to actually be one unless you are one of those newfangled New Accountants who drives sports cars, has a pilot’s license, captains a yacht, and supports dizzy blondes or muscular beach boys. No, it is not cool to be an accountant even if one is a lawyer as well, for then the scorn that one suffers includes cruel lawyer jokes.

Still, I would rather be simply a lawyer than a hybrid lawyer-accountant, lest my own jokes become too dry. If I could read Blackstone and hang up a shingle as was done in the good old days, I would probably be a practicing trial lawyer at present, because I love nonviolent arguments and show biz. At least a lawyer has to tell a good story if he wants to win his case. An accountant keeps tallies while the lawyer tells tales. Of course every natural-born lawyer has inherited an accounting gene. You see, when the pharaoh’s bookkeepers were not busy keeping inventory and accounting for transactions, their language evolved from numbers to words and they started writing up accounts of events. Sometimes those accounts were not in accord with the tyrant’s best interests, especially when the scribes took up the people’s causes to enhance their own power in the palace.

But let’s not confuse cuenta with cuento, counters with storytellers, or accountants with lawyers, for the latter have come a long way from the former over the millennia. The king’s bookkeepers, notwithstanding their occasional frauds, are still considered to be the king’s men, lock, stock, and barrel. It is the storytellers educated in the classical trivium that we must watch out for, for their sophistry might gain them senate seats and even the presidency. They will get plenty of praise by virtue of their status, no matter how much what they say conflicts with what they do.

If an aspiring accountant thinks she is going to at least get praise for work well done, she will discover soon enough that accounting is usually a thankless job. I have been working part-time for public accounting firms over the last five years. Only once has a partner expressly thanked me for my work. I was astonished when he took me and only me out to lunch, which caused me to put off my decision to leave the firm for a year.

A paycheck must be considered as thanks enough, the more generous the better. Accountants are “picky” because they are concerned with details and must always be on the lookout for mistakes – the number of mistakes that can and will eventually be made is virtually infinite, especially given our accretionary tax system. All work should be reviewed at least once, and the major aspects are usually reviewed once again by the partner, and then there may be peer reviews. Accountants who work their way up in public accounting firms have been “picked” on for errors so long that they become casehardened – praise might make them suspicious, not only of the flatterer but of themselves, so they will wave praise off when it seldom comes lest they make the mistake of getting a fat head. Of course accountant-lawyers can be doubly trying: It is certainly unpleasant to be treated as a hostile witness by a reviewer trained in dialectics – Socrates’ most agreeable interlocutors were dummies set up in advance to be knocked down.

So forget praise. To mollycoddle staff with “positive reinforcement” might inflate their egos and cause them to make mistakes. Better to knuckle under and concentrate on the details, checking everything out. Definitely be paranoid, because chances are that you or someone in your office is making a mistake at this very moment!

In this context I was most amused by the text of an article in CFO Magazine (February 2008) entitled ‘what’s wrong with the kids?’ Apparently millennium kids with undergraduate degrees want to like their jobs and to have plenty of praise to boot. “Long hours not required” reads the ideal Want Ad, “come and go as you please. Spend as much time Web-surfing as you want. Work on the projects you like and refuse the rest. If you don’t feel like finishing a project, your manager will gladly take it. Excellent salary and benefits; on-the-job napping encouraged.”

Millennium accountants purportedly think in terms not of what they can do for their firm, but what the firm can do for them. And of all things, millenials mostly want to work with managers they can respect and with people they enjoy; they want to have a happy work/life balance, and a short commute; they want to have a nice office space, furnished with state-of-the-art technology, in a socially responsible company. What the heck is wrong with these undergraduates? They are obviously spoiled brats. One CFO grumbles that many staff members require an excessive amount of praise: “You don’t need to be recognized for everything you do,” said Melissa Morales, CFO of a real estate developer.

Well, these nincompoops are simply not qualified. Only those undergraduates who have served a two-year internship at the most hardnosed public accounting firms, where they have been crammed in small workspaces with people who can’t stand their personal noises and smells, and rotated around the number-crunching factories for some absurd reason, where they are constantly interrogated and their work diligently criticized, should be considered for accounting and finance jobs on the client side. And then, after they are hired, no doubt they will be ecstatic when hearing a kind word or two from the CFO herself during the annual review. In fact, I know several CPAs who have left public firms and are now happily lodged in all sorts of companies, doing the same old routines day after day – their lives seem duller to me.

Of course some Fortune 500 firms are caving in to the childish demands of the new generation of accountants, and with profitable effect. One can go with the flow, take advantage of the kids’ high tech education and personal preferences, and gladly kiss them good bye in five years. So the older set is learning to change their attitude and get dogs for loyalty. But that is on the client side, which is normally more lenient.

As for the public accounting firms, one must know that the accountants there are not really the mean-minded managers and cold-hearted calculators they are sometimes made out to be. The intense demand for accuracy is necessary to their success. Accountants who are not on the marketing end of the biz are not famous for their HR skills including mollycoddling and praising employees, yet many of them are quite humane in their own way, simply because they are human beings. Still, I would not want to be an accountant – I vehemently disagreed when an accountant told me that I was one the other day. When I think an accountant is being mean and cruel, I look at him and ask myself, “How would I like being him?” Knowing what I know about his business, a wave of sympathy invariably sweeps over me, and I apologize for him.