Another Hot Mess

(This entry is part of a writers' prompt exercise at Studio 30 Plus. Take yourself a merry little jaunt over there to see some fine writing. Maybe you'll want to join up.)

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

It was a fair question. Necessary even, under the circumstances, as she had appeared unbidden and unannounced and dressed in such a way as seemed calculated to land me in hot water. I'm not talking about a short skirt or low-cut blouse either. She was full-on exotic dancer provocative in thigh-high leather boots and a thong—too much make-up, too little fabric, and jewelry in places that would have been uncomfortable had she made even the slightest attempt at modesty by covering them up.

“Paul asked me to stop by,” she said, as if that explained everything.

Now, Paul is a man of the cloth—a born-again evangelical preacher of the fire and brimstone variety. Paul has a take-no-prisoners approach to the interpretation of Holy Scripture, and his sermons often leave the blue haired ladies who sit in the front pews nodding their heads in judgment while the rest of the congregation squirm in their seats as their spiritual failings are recounted from the pulpit. Paul is not the kind of man who would casually ask a stripper to “stop by,” let alone to stop by wearing one of the costumes of her profession.

Paul has his secrets to be sure—as do we all—dark thoughts and unseemly proclivities and occasional passions that would chill the bones of his associates if ever they were exposed. I know all of Paul's secrets, or at least I thought I did, because I created them. I gave them to him along with his sculpted hair, graying just so at the temples, his twelve hundred dollar suits, his bottled tan, and his honey timbered baritone voice. I gave Paul everything he has and made him everything he is and settled him down to stir the currents and confound the aspirations of the other characters in my next book. Paul is a character in a work of fiction, my work of fiction. He is not supposed to be making life choices I don't know about. He is not supposed to be changing up the mix and adding new actors into my narrative. He's not. He knows this . . . or should.

“What's your name?” I ask.

“Elise.”

“Don't you think you're a little . . . I don't know . . . tawdry for a visit to a parsonage?”

“We're not in a parsonage, silly. We're in your office—the same office where you wrote your last book. What was it called? Speedster? You know, the one that was full of strippers and kinky sex and ridiculous cars and enough dead bodies to fill a good sized morgue. I really don't think I'm too tawdry for the room that spawned that hot mess, do you?”

“I suppose not, Elise, but this is a different book. I like to think I've got range as a writer. I want to demonstrate that range by writing books that are different from the ones I've already written. I don't want to feature exotic dancers in every book I write just because I did it once.”

“Um, who's the most successful author you know?”

“Well, I don't actually know her, but that would be J.K. Rowling.”

“And you think she showed a lot of range, as you call it?”

“Well yeah, I do.”

“Jonah. sweetie, she wrote the same book seven times. Same characters. Same plot. Same audience. Same themes. Voldemort concocts some scheme to get rid of Harry Potter. Potter goes out of his way to avoid confrontation so he can wallow in adolescent angst and increasingly hormonal pursuits. Dumbledore steps in to teach Potter a lesson about destiny and perseverance. In the end, Potter triumphs over evil, usually by accident. Somewhere in the middle there's a quidditch match.”

“So you don't think she's a good writer?”

“She's brilliant. What I'm saying is you don't have to run a different race every time you break out of the gate. You can be a good writer, and successful too, writing the same stuff over and over and over. Once you've found your audience, they're not going to get tired of your schtick. That's what made Harry Potter popular. That's why there are about a million girls my age writing vampire romance and a million women of a certain age writing dirty stories about forbidden love. People want the same thing over and over, and all you've got to do is change the names to keep them engaged.”

“I'm not buying it. You can't reduce literature to some repeatable formula. It's all about bending rules and pushing boundaries.”

“So now you're trying to tell me that Speedster was literature? Please!”

“No. No. Of course not. I wanted to write something commercial. I felt like I needed to make some money so I could afford the luxury of writing something good.”

“And how did that work out for you?”

It was a revelation to learn at this point just how well a naked girl can do smug. Her smile was textbook. She was right of course. I've sold maybe 40 copies of Speedster in the four months since I published it—not exactly keeping my muse in champagne and silks.

“Not as well as I would have liked,” I admitted.

“So you need to write at least one more commercial book, don't you? And if that one doesn't succeed, you'll need to write another, and another, and so on until you can finally afford to be an artist. Tell me I'm wrong.”

“You know I can't do that, else you wouldn't even be here.”

“But I'm not here for you. I'm here for Paul.”

“That again? I may have allowed Paul a certain amount of freedom within the book, but he can't dictate new characters and sub-plots to me. It's just not done.”

“You'll have to take that up with Paul.”

“Paul? I'm the author here. You may be able to show up in my office, but you don't get into the book unless I write you in. It's as simple as that.”

Elise was trying to look thoughtful or distracted as I said this. I couldn't tell which. She probably would have adjusted an article of clothing if she'd been wearing any. As it was, she just stared at her fingernails like she was trying to decide if she needed a manicure.

“I think you know it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that,” she said at last. “If you don't write me in, Paul's not going to show up. I'm a condition of his continued participation.”

“What is this, some kind of work action?” I asked. “A character in my book, a character who is wholly my invention, is going to strike if I don't accede to his demand? And his demand is that I provide him with a stripper? Really, this is too much.”

“Yeah, well, at the risk of sounding flippant, you made him the way he is so it's really on you, isn't it?”

And so it is.

“It seems you and Paul have me over a barrel,” I said.

“I know,” she said, batting her eyelids to emphasize the irony. “So you're going to write me in?”

“Sure, but we both understand you're a product of my imagination, right?”

She hesitated. Something like worry creased her forehead.

“Um, yeah?”

“Then I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you breast implants.”

Day 72 - Idea of a Lifetime...or Not

          There was nothing worth getting excited about on the job boards today—a recurring theme. I didn’t even try applying. I’m excited about the martini article. I posted a link to in on my FaceBook account and got 17 hits. Seems people are way more interested in drinking than they are in poetry, even silly poetry. Again, it’s a way different world than it used to be. People used to indulge in a little culture of an evening, and baser pursuits were pursued later and behind locked doors. Now it’s slam down a bunch of cocktails, mate, then play video games into the night. Oh well, maybe my martini recipes will add a little refinement back into the mix. Or maybe I should consider an article or a series of articles on how to date strippers. I wouldn’t know anything about it of course, but I’ll bet a hell of a lot of recruiters with ADHD would manage to focus long enough to read them. This is beginning to sound like a breakthrough idea as I write it down. I’m going to have to think on this some more.

*****

          I had a breakthrough idea once when I was still working in public accounting. I thought I was going to be rich. There was a moment of complete clarity when all the parts came together. I realized that I had the resources to  pull it off, that it would work, and that, most importantly, people were going to send me money.

          This happened in the mid eighties. The IRS had just issued a new regulation that required everyone who was taking a deduction for business use of an automobile to keep a contemporaneous log of that use. That meant that taxpayers were supposed to accumulate the business mileage and expenses on their automobiles as they were incurred, that is daily, rather than making some kind of estimate at the end of the year. Like most IRS regulations, this one was in response to perceived abuses.

In addition to the log, taxpayers were also required to attest, in writing, that they had complied with the regulation, and to provide this written and signed attestation to their professional tax preparers. That meant that every CPA and every H&R Block office and every other tax preparer was going to have to get a log book and a signed statement from every one of their clients who wanted to take a deduction for business use of an automobile. The clerical burden of just this one provision of the tax regulations was going to be astronomical. Whole forests were going to be laid waste to create the paper.  

          I knew several things for certain as soon as I read the new rule:

• Almost no one was going to comply with the letter of the rule—at least not at first
• Almost all of the written attestations were going to be bald-faced lies
• In order to get taxpayers to comply at all, the contemporaneous log was going to have to be extremely easy to use and keep track of
• Somewhere in the midst of this burdensome regulation was an opportunity to make some serious money

My idea then was this. Some smart cookie—me—should print easy to use log books that accumulated mileage and auto expenses by day, week, month and year. The log books should include the attestation statement with a signature line at the end of the book. A plain English explanation of the regulation should appear at the beginning of the book. And the idea that tied all these things together into a marketable flash of brilliance: the log books needed to be sold to individual CPA firms whose names and addresses would be emblazoned on the covers. The CPA firms would distribute the books to their clients as promotional gifts. Regulation met, signed, sealed and delivered, and the cost of compliance turned into a marketing tool for my fellow professionals.

Several interesting things happened on the way to realizing my dream. The execution of the idea actually went pretty smoothly. I designed my own log book. I did the layout in a spreadsheet. I wrote the appropriate verbiage. I bought a list of Florida CPA firms, having decided to start with Florida and expand from there. I found a printer willing and able to take on the job in small lots. I set up a company, rented a mailbox, mailed out a flyer, and waited for the money to come pouring in.

It didn’t pour right away. It trickled at first, but it did come in and it was encouraging as hell to a fledgling entrepreneur. Every day I went to the mail box and there were checks in it. It was exciting. Then two things showed up in the mail box that took some of the joy out of the enterprise. The first was from a lawyer representing someone in Michigan claiming that I had infringed on their copyright. This was not really a big deal because they were only claiming that I had used their name on my log book and that their rights predated mine. I had taken every step I knew to prevent this from happening, but I guess you can’t cover every base. I had paid to register my copyright, and sent a sample book along with the fee. I had done a name search to determine that no one else was using that particular name and nothing had come up. But there it was in the letter. I didn’t have the wherewithal to fight it, so I changed the name. The only real problem was that I had a lot of flyers out with the infringing name, but I decided not to worry about that. I’d just fly right from that point forward and hope for the best.

The other disturbing thing that showed up in my mail box was my flyer with someone else’s name on it. I mean they had taken my flyer, word-for-word, and by extension my idea, put their name and address on it and sent it to all the CPA firms in Florida. The word-for-word part is what upset me the most. I fully expected someone else to try to capitalize on my idea. I knew it was a great idea, and there was really nothing about it to keep people from copying it. What I hoped was that I would get out there first with a product so good that it would be difficult for anyone else to catch up. Well this guy, whoever he was, didn’t bring one new idea to the table. He didn’t even try to change up the advertising. Word-for-word! Talk about a lazy thief. I mean really. The only thing that kept me from going ballistic and hunting this guy down was that he had decided for some reason to charge twice as much as I was for the books. He wasn’t just lazy. He was stupid. So I quit worrying about him as well.

The orders started to pick up, the bank balance started to grow. I was feeling pretty smug about this time, and then the bottom fell out. I don’t know if you can anticipate this kind of thing or not. You’d have to be pretty pessimistic to count on something like this happening. There are all kinds of contingencies and all kinds of things that can go wrong, but for your whole business plan, the very premise of the model you design, tweak, stroke and stoke to evaporate overnight just doesn’t seem fair or plausible. Yet that’s exactly what happened. The IRS got so many complaints about how difficult their new regulation was that they decided to rescind it. That’s right. You heard me. The agency everyone loves to hate, the rat bastards who stay awake at night thinking up ways to make your life more miserable, decided to act nice and cancel a burdensome rule.

Maybe they had figured out as I had that the regulation was not going to raise the level of compliance with the code governing automobile deductions. It was only going to raise the level of detail contained in the documents supporting the deductions. The level of fraud was going to stay the same. The number of trees killed to substantiate that level of fraud was the only thing likely to change.

My budding business died in a matter of days. The orders stopped. The mail box was empty. The bank balance went to pay for some books we had printed on spec. I didn’t lose money thankfully, but I didn’t make any either, and I never got over the feeling that I had been cheated out of a really promising future.

Day 70 - Excellent Written Communications Skills Only Get You So Far

          I applied to 5 jobs today through Indeed, although all of them were on CareerBuilder.com. CareerBuilder seems to have the most and the best listings. I joined a pay site called The Ladders that specializes in jobs that pay over $100,000 per year. It cost $30 to get a basic membership that gives me access to their jobs and the content of the articles they put up. They are great at promoting themselves. That is to say that they are really good at making themselves sound really good which is why I parted with the thirty bucks. Now we’ll see if they can actually deliver. Like all the rest of the sites they allow you to search their postings by job title, key word, and geographical location. I still want to stay in Florida so I turned that filter on. I wouldn’t mind going back to Arkansas, but anywhere else I’d just be biding my time until I could get back to Florida. It’s expensive and hot, but it suits me somehow. Besides I have a lot of family in Florida including my children and grandchildren. Living here just cuts down on the travel required at holidays and family gatherings.

          I check my Triond account about every hour. So far 2 people have read my article. It’s nice to know that someone did, but since it only pays a penny for every 7-10 people who click through I’m certainly not going to be buying an Aston Martin with the proceeds. The trick of course is to have a lot of articles up. It’s best if they’re all related and on a topic that you have some expertise in and credentials for that’s also of general interest to a lot of people. Even then you have to work at driving traffic to the articles through the judicious and creative use of blogs and social networking sites. This may be harder than it looks. I’ll have to post some more articles on different topics and see what people are actually interested in reading.

Digitally disadvantaged as I am I realize that I’m going to have to amp up my online presence if I’m going to get anything cooking with writing. I’m going join FaceBook and create a blog. I’m already on LinkedIn, but that’s a network for professional connections. It’s supposed to be useful for getting a job, but I’m not seeing anyone beating my doors down just yet to offer me a cushy position. Like anything else on line it requires constant attention and tweaking until you’ve reached a critical mass of contacts. It also requires a combination of constant activity on the message boards, publishing, and cross-linking all your activities to establish some kind of professional credibility.

There is one other problem with all this digital networking. I have to keep my writing activities segregated from my accounting activities. The silly poem I put up yesterday on Triond is fairly innocuous, but my other writings—I have a number of short stories and a novel in progress—tend to be a little more outré shall we say, a little more earthy. Now I’m not talking about anything offensive, but it is different from what most business managers would expect of their accountants. The novel for instance features what is generally known as a gentlemen’s club and several exotic dancers, a crime boss, a priest having a crisis of faith, and a ponzi-scheme operator. What board of directors would care to have their financial matters in the hands of an accountant who knows enough about such things to make a compelling story out of them when they are able to choose from among a slew of candidates who have not a creative bone in their body? No, no one on LinkedIn must ever be able to connect the dots to anything I might write and post on line—at least not until I get something published and start banking fat royalty checks.

Day 20 - Budget Burlesque

Accounting wouldn't actually cook the numbers,

but they did agree to tart them up a little.

          Bill got with me first thing this morning about the budgets. They’ve been finished for weeks, but corporate has been toying around with the idea of adding another product line. The new line will be similar to the specialty vehicles we already build, but able to access more forbidding terrain and equipped for more adventurous missions. Neither management nor sales have any idea how many we can sell or how much it will cost to build them, but we’re going to have a go. Before we go, they want to include the new line in the budgets to give them an idea of the outcome, even though it will be a guess at best what kind of impact they will have.

          I’ve been through this kind of thing before. Management gets an idea, and wants to know right away if it’s smart or not. Of course they don’t have enough information to make such a determination, but determine it they will and once it’s determined it will become gospel and people’s jobs will depend on whether or not the company hits the projections that were based on lies, conjecture, and wishful thinking.

          Based on what Bill has told me it will take me about 20 minutes to layer this new substrate of B.S. into the budget. It will be done smartly, with a nicely worded narrative on the assumptions that I will load up with high sounding techno-babble and optimistic phrasing. It will be a beautiful and treacherous piece of work. I told Bill that, if I push, I can probably have it finished tomorrow afternoon.

Financial statements are like women. The more beautiful they are, the more willing are we to believe anything they say. Pictures and graphs in a multitude of pleasant colors, balanced nicely with striking fonts, highlighted in bolds and italics, offset by sufficient white space to make it all seem pure and unaffected--these kinds of effects just suck us in with tease and promise. It’s just a budget, but once it's published its nature changes. It's as if you married a siren beauty, and she turned out to be the harpy of your worst nightmares. Now the promises made are all yours, and you'd better-by-God make them happen.
          Management and the board of directors have already made up their minds what they are going to do. At this point they are just looking for corroboration. The budget will just be telling them what they already believe about themselves—that they are savvy and intuitive businessmen who deserve whatever success comes their way. If I put anything in the budget that suggests otherwise, it would just confirm their wisdom in having fired me for an incompetent dolt who couldn’t see reason. If for some unforeseen reason they fail in spite of the beautiful documents I’m going to give them that will say they won’t fail, why then they’ll just have to fire the incompetent bastards who couldn't execute to plan.

The next time you see a financial report full of attractive graphs and enticing pictures with a narrative explanation by the CEO of the company outlining rosy prospects for the future, think of it like this. That report is the moral equivalent of going to a ‘gentlemen’s club’ and paying a stripper twenty bucks to give you a table dance and talk to you like you are some kind of Adonis. You need only look in the mirror to know that she is yanking your chain in a major way.

Don’t be seduced by the audit report either. The auditors are supposed to ensure that what’s in the financial statements is true. They don’t say that of course. They hedge quite a bit on the true nature of their business in the Auditors' Report, but it’s what everyone expects of them--the truth. The truth gets harder and harder to ferret out the more complicated business becomes. A modern auditor is hard pressed to get it right, and quickly, and under budget, and without getting the client pissed off. That’s why we have spectacular audit failures like Enron and Worldcom and a host of others. In the end, in the grand scheme of things, the auditors’ attestation is loosely analogous to a stripper’s make-up—makes her look better than she does without it, but she’s still what she is, and no matter what she says, she loves your money more than she loves you.