At Least We're Not Crooks

I'd like to introduce myself. I'm a senior accountant here at Nortel Networks...all right, former senior accountant as of last week, though don't tell the guys at the country club until they renew my membership. Anyway, on behalf of all accountants and financial managers everywhere, I think it's time to clear the air of concerns about our profession and integrity. Despite what you may have been informed by your stock broker, we are not crooks, thieves, or greedy pickpockets with a flair for the dramatic when it comes to financial reporting. We take our work seriously, adhere to the highest standards, and would never knowingly mislead you, our shareholders.

You see, the problem is...well, how shall I put this: We can't add. Actually, we can't subtract very well either, and multiplication gives most of us such fits of anxiety that only a week-long trip to the cottage seems able to fix...and don't even bring up the subject of division.

We've lost more than a few trying to sort that one out.

Now you may be asking yourself: How is it that we ever actually got our hands on the old financial tiller, as it were, guiding multi-billion-dollar companies with tens of thousands of employees (well, before we started firing them, anyway) through a sea of balance sheets, income statements and cash flow projections, when we didn't know a decimal point from a needle point?

I think it's time to come clean. You see, years ago when I was a young lad just starting out at university, it really wasn't very "cool" to be an accountant. No one invited you to parties or on road trips, and getting a date was next to impossible. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be married today if it weren't for an unfortunate incident involving mashed potatoes and a skate board, but the point is, we were in serious need of an image overhaul. No one was coming into the profession, there were all those numbers to count, and except for a few overworked bookkeepers and the odd well-trained parrot with a calculator, there was no one around to tally them.

So we started to throw big parties, accountant recruitment drives, if you will.

They were real shindigs, I can tell you: wine, cheese, a game of strip twister around midnight if everyone was game. One time we even had a stripper night, which was really the only way we could get a woman to come at the time. Before long we were skipping classes, flunking tests, and it was only out of sheer embarrassment that they gave us our degrees.

And it wasn't just at our school; it was everywhere. It was this dirty secret that no one would talk about until it became quite clear at meetings that none of us knew what in hell we were doing. If you could have seen the look of relief on our faces. Pretty soon, we just took to tossing darts at a board of numbers and writing them down. And we became rather good at it too, winning the National Dart Championship three years running (it's quite a big thing at the annual CMA convention).

Ever watch darts on television? Accountants, every one of them.

I guess it's also time you finally learned this about accountancy: the only reason you keep hearing that CA exams are difficult is because the association insists that we be able to count our pocket change as part of the exam. After we caught on to this little trick and started emptying our pockets before each test, they started issuing "test change."

Thankfully, it's only a small part of the overall evaluation, which mostly involves pictures and simple nursery rhymes that even a child can understand. This could be quite embarrassing, if we didn't let our kids take them for us...well, otherwise there wouldn't be any money to put Christmas presents under the tree each year, now would there?

We like take solace in the fact that children can't drive our BMWs...and we hope you do too, because we aren't stealing your hard-earned retirement, we just don't know what we're doing with it.