Day 76 - A Short Discourse on Creativity

          Absolutely nothing is going on in the job search. This waiting is even more boring than working in accounting if you can imagine that. Accountants, since they are thought by the general populace to be boring, are also thought to have a high tolerance for boredom. I think mine is quite low. Maybe that’s why I’m unemployed.

          When I first started out in public accounting back in the seventies I had a neighbor in my apartment complex named Wendy who was co-producer of a local PBS TV show. She had a lot of latitude from station management about what to put on her show, but the show was meant to feature items of local interest. One day she got the idea to do a series of shows on interesting accountants. She led me to believe that she got the idea from me, as she believed I was interesting, at least in the sense that I didn’t remind her of a stereotypical CPA. In retrospect I’m not sure what she meant by that exactly, but at the time I thought I understood it perfectly. I was also just narcissistic enough to want to be on TV representing interesting people everywhere.

          Wendy’s plan was to locate a representative sample of CPAs within the local accounting offices, and to either interview them about or, even better, film them actively pursuing interesting pastimes. She told me she was hoping to get some thrilling footage of CPAs jumping out of airplanes, riding motorcycles, racing cars, sailing, and so on. This actually represented quite a departure from whatever it was that she found fascinating in me, because I didn’t do any of these things. The most interesting thing I did at the time was to make and fly kites. I doubt that very many other people would have found that in the least bit captivating, and I’m sure that it wouldn’t have made for a very compelling documentary television piece.

We made an appointment for Wendy to come by my place with a camera man to do an interview. Maybe she thought that scintillating conversation made for good television. Truth be known I didn’t do scintillating either. I didn’t have any idea what kind of questions she was going to ask, but I was excited to get the chance to look competent and engaging, and I was sure that I would acquit myself well. The time for the interview came and went with no Wendy. She didn’t show. I called her a couple of days later to ask what had happened.

          “I couldn’t find any interesting accountants,” she said. “I guess the stereotype is true.”
          “What about me?” I asked.

          “You’re not enough to make a show,” she said.

          It didn’t break my heart. I took what she said at face value. I was happy to think that she had pinned the concept on my low boredom quotient, and that I really was toiling away in a profession that had no other souls worthy of a conversation on television. When I think back on this incident nearly 30 years later I have a few questions for Wendy that I wish I had thought to ask when I had the chance:

• What on earth had made her think I was interesting?
• If she was really looking for the kinds of pursuits that made for marketable cinematography like sky diving and automobile racing what did she think was going to happen in my apartment?
• Did she really think that things like motorcycle riding and sailing made otherwise boring individuals exciting to know?

Maybe Wendy had actually figured out then what it took me several more years to learn, and that is that guys (and girls) who sky dive, ride motorcycles, race cars, sail boats (or yachts) or any of dozens of other risky and exhilarating activities are just as boring if not more so than the guys and girls who sit around their entertainment centers eating chips and salsa and watching American Idol reruns. The only thing that sets them apart is the increased likelihood that they will die a spectacular death while engaged in the pursuit that interests them, and thus spare the rest of us another interminable account over yet another chardonnay about what an exciting ride or race or jump or beat to windward they had last week-end. Tax code is only marginally duller.

I have looked at the question of my own interestingness many, many times since Wendy’s failure to execute on her high concept. I doubt that I was ever interesting in the sense that Wendy was looking for, and that is perhaps the real reason she didn’t show up and she didn’t do her show. By some other standard however—a standard that I admittedly don’t understand any better than I understand Wendy’s—I may be too interesting, by which I mean creative and smart. I say this because people have told me so and, because they have told me so, I’ve had to consider that not only might it be true but it might also be the reason that my career seems to have stalled about ten years ago and not managed to reboot itself.

Henry’s daughter once told me that she thought I was brilliant but that I had no street smarts. By street smarts she meant an abiding mistrust of my fellow man. Henry and his entire family always think everyone is out to take advantage of them because they are out to take advantage of everybody who will let them. They were busy taking advantage of me when Henry’s daughter gave me the little ‘street smarts’ lecture, which may have been her attempt to give me a heads up at the time—she thinking I was too smart to figure it out for myself and feeling sorry for me.

Alicia once told me that I was too smart for my own good. I don’t remember the context any more. It’s been too long. I don’t think she was giving me a heads up. Henry’s daughter may have been capable of feeling sorry for me, but I do not believe that Alicia was. I told her that there was no such thing as being too smart any more than there was such a thing as being too rich or too good looking. I said this without any apology for the paraphrasing or credit to Wallis Simpson for the original quote ("A woman can never be too rich or too thin.") which I’m sure has lost some of its original panache in this age of eating disorders. It is the only time that Alicia ever looked at me with anything that remotely approached respect. Neither the look nor the respect was very long lived.

A wag once told me that businesses don’t like a lot of creativity in their accountants. That much I know is true, and I know it’s true because I think of myself as a creative person. I started out in college majoring in English. I wrote poetry, short stories, started more novels than I can count. I gave up on it as a profession because it’s really hard. Garrison Keillor once said if you can write a coherent short story you are smarter than almost all the executives in corporate America. I suspect that that is true. Even before I managed to put my first coherent short story down on paper I knew that I was smarter than every corporate executive I had ever met. I’m sure they all see it differently. Corporate executives are not easily cowed by smart guys. Corporate executives are the kind of people who move in closer to the infield when a smart guy comes up to bat. If they ever have to then watch a grand-slam-home-run ball sail over their heads, they are secure in the knowledge that it was a fluke and will never, ever in a million years happen again.
     
          Andy Fastow, the CFO of Enron, was a creative accountant. His problem was that he was creative in accounting rather than in writing compelling fiction or poetry or painting water colors. He designed and built the house of cards that came tumbling down around everyone’s ears and created a whole new era of burdensome regulations in the financial accounting community. Andy Fastow is in prison. He was the first to go. Ken Lay died to stay out. Jeffry Skilling, one of The Smartest Guys in the Room according to the 2003 book of that name by Fortune Magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, tried to stay out of prison by maintaining among other things that he was too dumb to understand what Fastow was doing. (Dick Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers, appears to be trying the same defense with respect to Lehman's accounting for Repo 105 transactions undertaken to manage the balance sheet before Lehman's ultimate collapse.) None of those guys can write a good short story, although you would be hard pressed to argue that they were not creative.

Day 69 - Seeking a More Poetic Existence

          There seem to be a lot of jobs in health care—more than in any other single segment of the economy. I think that I might like to break out of the manufacturing niche and get into health care. The money would be comparable. The benefits would probably be better. The working conditions would almost certainly be an improvement. And of course we have already discussed my attraction for nurses. My one hope would be that I would be surrounded by smarter people. This is not to suggest that smart people do not work in the manufacturing sector, but only that they tend not to be in charge.

I actually started my accounting career with a health care provider—a kidney dialysis facility in Tampa. That was years ago, however, and things have changed a lot since. Now every accounting job I see listed in the health sector requires at least five years experience with a primary care provider. Unless a little good fortune comes my way I might just be stuck doing what I’ve been doing or doing nothing at all.

Periodically I have flights of entrepreneurial fancy. The last time I gave in to one of these I bought a small florist shop, moved it, merged it with a much larger plant and garden center, and promptly lost my shirt. Failing in a spectacular fashion builds character and also a considerable immunity against further flights of fancy. So far at least I have been able to resist the temptation to further entrepreneurial exploits. It doesn’t hurt that some eighteen years later I am still in hock to an assortment of credit card companies for more than $60 thousand—the price of refusing to file bankruptcy, and a nut that I do not seem to be able to crack in spite of earning a respectable salary.

Still there is allure in the prospect of not having to work for fools and charlatans. I’ve really had enough of that, and were it not for my astronomical credit card debt I would be looking for an opportunity to be my own fool and charlatan once again. Actually I am looking, but my search is constrained.

What I need is an opportunity that doesn’t require any initial capital outlay. This means my product has to be virtually free to produce. There can be no requirement for facilities, equipment, production workers, or materials inputs. Advertising will have to be direct and viral. Distribution will have to be on an as-ordered basis, orders pre-paid. As I’m sure you realize, we’re talking the Internet.

We’re also talking about writing. Writing is virtually free to produce. All you need is an idea to get started. Everyone already owns all the other necessaries to getting the idea into or onto something that someone else can read. All that’s required then is a mechanism for monetizing the process. If you look you will see that the Internet is rife with places where you can publish articles on practically any subject and get paid based on the number of people who either read the article or, more commonly, click through from the article to a place where they actually buy something. I signed up today for one of those. I even published an article. Not an article really but a funny poem about diet and exercise. Here it is in its entirety.

IMMORTALITY

If we could all decide our fate, and name our time of death and date,

Most all of us would check out late, and queue en-masse at Heaven’s gate—

Arriving at the same damn time, procrastinators in a line,

Who’d put off dying long’s we could, but just the same in coffin’s wood

Would all be lying stiff as boards awaiting judgment from our lords.

Though this is what we’d all prefer, yet most believe we must defer

To higher powers this life length choice. Sing halleluiah! Let’s rejoice!

But some there are that what they think’s our span of life’s not writ in ink,

But penciled on our page of fate—a mere suggestion to abate—

Just change the pattern’s warp and weft to raise the sum of days we’ve left.

The starting point is what to eat. The fare is spare and short on meat.

Less sweet desserts, less this and that, a pan-caloric tit for tat

Less fat or carbs—just take your pick. What works for some makes others sick.

More fibrous greens, organic fruit, whole-kernel grains, and tofu suit

The longer, leaner lifetime mess (though much of it be flavorless.)

Then what’s required is discipline and going placidly within—

A regimen of proper diet, avoiding all excess and riot,

Restraint in all save exercise (in working out we’ll agonize.)

For fitness is the way to stay about a longer time than they

That shirks their time inside the gym, and journey fat through thick and thin.

Hard work and sweat must now align to gobble up great gobs of time—

Running, rowing, dance aerobic, pumping iron, and skipping ropic,

Swimming climbing, step and stretching, jogging to the point of retching—

Till weary rapture of corpuscle coursing through sore, aching muscle

Signals that this hard persistence barely lengthened our existence.

Then free from guilt but full of pain we pause to calculate our gain,

And find when appetite’s denied that all life’s fruits are froze and dried,

And though we may have added years, they’ll have to be reviewed through tears.

Oh, we can choose long life to live, knowing we’ve but one to give,

But racking life out to its limit sadly leaves scant living in it.

A silly thing surely with, hopefully, some entertainment value. We’ll see what happens.