Day 178 - Jobs, Lies, and Videotape

          I scored an interview last week, the first one in this area. It wasn’t a recruiter either. It was a real job. There have been no listings for controllers or CFOs in this area. I decided to lower my sights some. Now that we have offloaded so much of our stuff and cut our living expenses to the bone I can actually get by on a lot less money than I’m used to making. The job I interviewed for was an assistant controller position for an outfit that publishes contract bid lettings for construction contractors. The salary range is less than half what I used to make, but realistically that’s still four times what I get in unemployment benefits. It’s amazing to me how many different ways I’ve had to adjust my thinking.

          The HR manager called to set up the appointment. She e-mailed me directions to the office. Included in her e-mail, which I didn’t actually read until it was too late to respond, was a request to reply to her explaining why I was willing to work for so much less money. I figure this has to be as problematic for potential employers as it is for me—maybe more so. Anyway I went to the interview without responding. The interview was with the controller, a pleasant enough young man probably 20-25 years younger than me. His concern was whether I would be able to adjust to working for him when I had obviously been used to having a lot more authority and autonomy in my previous positions. This is a good question, one I wasn’t really prepared for as I hadn’t really thought about it. I was more hung up on the money issue.

I think I answered it pretty well. I told him that I was all about the work and that as long as I was engaged and making a contribution it didn’t matter to me who I was taking direction from. Besides with 30 years experience I wasn’t going to need very much direction, a happy circumstance that was going to free up some of his time that would otherwise be applied to managing me. This seemed to satisfy him. We got along very well. He told me the office was full of women—the whole office, not just the accounting department. He said that in terms of men it would just be him and me.

I told him about the question the HR manager had asked in her e-mail, and that I hadn’t been able to respond. He said they were worried that once the economy had recovered I would bolt for a better paying position. I knew this. It’s certainly a legitimate concern. The truth is that of course I would. Who wouldn’t leave a junior position for more than twice the money?

I knew I had to lie. The controller knew I had to lie, else he would have asked the question right away. It was the only thing either of us really cared about.

I did have a pretty good story though. I told him about Nelson. I told him that I knew I was going to be settling for less money when I decided to move down here to take care of Nelson, that money wasn’t the issue anymore. I was here because my family needed me to be here, and I had altered my lifestyle and my expectations to make it work to everyone’s benefit. I wasn’t about to change all that for more money.

It was a good lie because it was almost true. He acted like he believed me, but I didn’t get the job. The HR manager e-mailed again on Friday to tell me they were going with another candidate.

Here’s another problem with the economy. How many people besides me are regularly put into positions where their only logical recourse is to lie? I’m guessing millions. And why is that? We’ve got this whole shell game built up around the process of finding a job to the point where everybody is spinning everything on both sides of the desk.

Employers are spinning stories about the health of their company and the nature of the workplace environment. Candidates are spinning stories about their experience and its relevance, about their willingness to do stuff they’d really rather not. The interviewers are asking questions calculated to determine the best liar from among the candidates that were chosen based on how compelling the fictions were in their résumés.

If they videotaped the process and hooked everybody up to polygraphs, no one would ever get or take a job. Is it any wonder, given the nature of the selection process, that we have the occasional crisis of ethics in the business community? This is how it is in the best of circumstances. A recession just exacerbates the whole mess.

Day 171 - Crosswords and Oaters

We’ve been here a little over a month now, and we’ve gotten into a routine in the evenings that seems to work for everyone. I may be crazy within a few weeks, but until then this is how it’s going to go. I serve dinner at 5:30. We have to call it supper or a lot of confusion ensues. Dinner is lunch. Breakfast is breakfast. Supper is served on TV trays while we watch the news. News has to be the local NBC affiliate. CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox are no good. We watch the news until 7:00 so we see an hour of local and a half hour of national news. There seems to be a lot of overlap, but when you’re as forgetful as Nelson it doesn’t matter so much.

At 7:00 we switch over to Wheel of Fortune followed by Jeopardy at 7:30. Nelson has watched Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy every night as long as I’ve known him. Sometime between 7:00 and 8:00 Anne stops by on her way home from work. If I’ve made a big enough dinner she will take some home for herself and her husband. She visits with Nelson for a while. When she leaves, Nelson walks her to the door. After she’s gone my wife generally goes back to work in the office.

At 8:00 I find a movie on the Western channel for Nelson and I to watch. These usually run to 9:30 or 10:00. After the movie Nelson goes to bed. If the movie runs long Nelson goes to bed anyway if he’s tired. If he goes to bed before the movie is over I have to watch the rest of it and give him a detailed account of the ending over breakfast the following morning. So for four and a half to five hours every night I’m tied up watching TV with Nelson or on his behalf. If I try to do something else he calls me every five minutes or so to see when I’m coming back. If I tell him I’d rather do something else he gets upset because he thinks I don’t like him. It’s way easier just to watch the TV.

When the movie is over I do the dishes. Sometimes I’ll do the dishes during Wheel or Jeopardy. During Anne’s visit is generally a good time to do this, but if for some reason her visit is short or delayed, I then have to watch the game shows and supply the answers (in the form of a question of course for Jeopardy) before the contestants do. Nelson loves when I do this. He thinks I am brilliant.

Nelson is also impressed when I knock off a crossword puzzle in 15 or twenty minutes. He loves crossword puzzles himself, so we have this in common. He brags to everyone who will listen that I do them in ink. I keep telling him that I use a pen because I can’t see the pencil marks, but he prefers to believe that using a pen is a sign of supreme and well-placed confidence. It’s nice to have someone who thinks that I am smart. Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like to have the people I work for think that I am as smart as Nelson does. I think that would go a long way to making the workday more palatable.

Day 164 - Conspiracy Theories

          The job boards are bleak for the Treasure Coast area. I should have thought to check before we moved, not that it would have made a difference under the circumstances. We still would have come here because we’re needed. Still it would have been good to know how bad things are here. This is a depressed area. St. Lucie and Martin Counties have unemployment rates that are 40 to 50 percent higher than the rest of the state. There don’t seem to be any jobs listed around here at my level and damn few even at entry level. My thought had been to only look for work in this area so we can stay here as long as we’re needed. I might have to rethink that.

          We switched out the cable service when we got here so that my wife and I could have high speed internet service for our computers. Nelson had a satellite system, and we changed to a cable provider that also offers fiber optic internet service. They finally got the last of it hooked up today. It’s been a struggle with a series of contractors to get the cable run, buried, hooked up, and programmed. Apparently all those things have to be done by different people. Lean they are not.

Nelson’s been grousing through the whole process. He hates change. The new remote is giving him fits. None of the buttons are in the same location they were on his old remote. He doesn’t remember that he has a new device in his hand until he’s already pressed a button according to its placement on the old one. Then, when he gets an unexpected result, he gets peevish. I spend a lot of time listening to him cuss at Mother Angelica because he accidently got to EWTN and can’t figure out how to get back to the Western Channel.

          He was adamant about the Western Channel. He’s been talking about it all week. He likes his western movies, and he needs to see one every night or his day is incomplete.

* * * * *

          As I work through my career history in accounting it becomes increasingly obvious to me that I have spent a great deal of time working for fools, charlatans, thieves, and scalawags who seemed bent on bringing me low. Even so I have always been able to exert a certain amount of influence over my circumstances, and there as always been a certain amount of leverage involved in knowing, because of my familiarity with the books and records, where all the bodies were buried.

          You could argue (as I’m sure the guys who fired me would) that I had a hand in my own undoing at my last company. I wasn’t what they hoped I would be, although, to be fair to myself, what they hoped I would be changed over time as evidenced by two years of positive performance reviews leading up to getting fired. But even had I been what they were hoping for at the end, I don’t think the outcome for me would have been very different. My real problem, I think, was expressing aloud my opinion that our CFO was too prone to knee-jerk hysterics, and that our corporate accounting manager was an anal-retentive myopic who couldn’t see the forest for the trees.

          Of course all that is water over the dam at this point. My current problem is not that I lost a job, but that I can’t get a new one because 1) there aren’t any jobs to speak of in the area where I have chosen to reside, and 2) there aren’t very many jobs anyplace else.

When I first lost my job, I thought I would get another in fairly short order. I had a pretty good résumé, a stable work history, and a boatload of experience. When I lost my last job, the result of a wholesale reduction in force to reduce overhead pursuant to a pre-packaged bankruptcy plan, I found a better job in just a few months. I had the sincere hope that things would not be materially different this time. As the global economy crumbles around me however, I am being forced to give up the notion that I will get a job quickly and easily. My hope for another job depends on an economic recovery more than it depends on my acumen, credentials, and persistence. To make matters worse, the hope of an economic recovery seems to grow more remote every day.

I honestly don’t know how we got into this fix. I’m not sure anyone else does either. There are lots of opinions being floated in the financial media, but not very much of it makes sense to me. As an accountant I want to be able to make the numbers work. I want to be able to follow and quantify the logic. I can’t.

Many analysts are blaming the sub-prime mortgage debacle—too many bad loans made to borrowers who did not adequately demonstrate their ability to repay. The sup-prime problem has been with us for over a year now, and everyone is talking as if we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. If we’ve known about the problem for over a year, how is it that the smartest kids on the block—the MBAs and analytical wizards on Wall Street, graduates of the finest institutions of higher learning in the country who are knocking down salaries and bonuses that the rest of us can only dream of—weren’t able to foresee the collapse and mitigate its effect?

How is it that, of the total of all mortgages outstanding, the percentage that is actually at risk of default is sufficient to tank the entire global economy. How is it that a relative handful of bad loans—bundled and securitized with good loans, rated investment grade by respected rating agencies, discounted to accommodate a historically reasonable rate of default, collateralized by real estate, guaranteed with sophisticated derivative contracts, and purchased and held by the very investment banking institutions that had a hand in their creation and so should have clearly understood the inherent risks—how is it that those loans were sufficient to cause the complete collapse of some of the largest banks in the world?

None of it makes any sense to me. I don’t think we’re being told the truth about any of it. We’re being spoon fed bits and pieces that seem to make sense in and of themselves, but they don’t add up to a coherent and believable whole. We’re not getting the whole picture. We’re getting a cubist Picaso. It may be art and it may be genius and it may be distracting, but no way in hell does it look like what it purports to represent.

The guys responsible for this ‘art’ have taken the rest of us to the cleaners. They took huge profits in their firms and huge bonuses personally while they built a house of cards that collapsed on the rest of us. After the collapse they took bailout money to make themselves whole again while the rest of us are left wondering how we (and our children) will pay the bill.

I’m not looking for a grand conspiracy behind all this. My personal feeling is that the captains of Wall Street are just another enclave of venal, self-serving, socially inbred fools, charlatans, thieves, and scalawags. The only real difference between them and the bottom-feeders it has been my misfortune to work for is that the Wall Street bozos play with much bigger numbers.

Others of my acquaintance do see a grand conspiracy here, whether real or imagined. I’ll grant them that their theories are at least as logical as mine. My theory depends on a confluence of coincidence, a perfect storm as it were of events and circumstances that worked together to undermine the foundations of our economic systems. The conspiracy theories depend only on the collusion of a small band of bad actors who already know each other, who work in the same industry, came from the same schools, and reside in the same geographical area. A grand conspiracy is much easier to orchestrate in this instance than an unfortunate confluence of coincidence.

I’ve already mentioned my brother-in-law who believes that there is an effort afoot by the extremely privileged to eliminate the middle classes. I find it hard to believe that this is a coordinated enterprise with and agenda and regular meetings, but, whether or not there exists an actual conspiracy, it grows increasingly difficult to argue that the middle classes are not at risk of disappearing.

Another conspiracy theory has been advanced by author, Sara McIntosh, in her novel, Shell Games. McIntosh is a former accounting consultant and forensic auditor in Chicago who sold her successful business to indulge her love of writing. Shell Games is a laudable first effort. She calls it a financial thriller, and, unlikely as it may seem to those whose eyes glaze over at the mention of accounting issues, she makes good on her promise by delivering a sexy page-turner.

The premise of Shell Games is that the current financial collapse is the result of a large-scale and exactingly orchestrated fraud that has been effectively covered up by the sudden availability of TARP funds. Of course there is more to it than that, and I won’t spoil the plot by revealing it here. Suffice to say that McIntosh has worked out a cogent explanation for the gaps in logic that I have found in the explanations being offered up by our government and by the financial media. Who is to say that McIntosh hasn’t hit on the real deal?

What sets her novel apart from other novels featuring large-scale financial fraud is the author’s intimate knowledge of the details of searching for accounting anomalies in huge volumes of transaction data. It takes an unusual and focused mentality to get a thrill from the discovery of emerging patterns in financial records, but there is perhaps greater skill involved in being able to convey that thrill to the uninitiated. The excitement of accounting is not something easily conveyed to an audience that has largely been persuaded that accountants are a uniformly boring bunch of socially inept slugs. McIntosh is anything but, and her book may do much to dispel the myth. If my TV producer friend, Wendy, had found Sara McIntosh all those years ago when she was looking for ‘interesting’ accountants, she may have been able to come up with a show.