10 Surprising Things that Really Suck about Losing a Job

Enjoying the view from your new office.

Everyone understands, I hope, that losing one's job is a huge setback. It's not for nothing that losing a job is referred to variously as being 'fired' or 'getting the axe' or, my personal favorite although you have to think about it a little to understand all the ramifications, being 'discharged'.

No matter what you call it, it sucks. It sucks on many levels, but most people understand the impact of losing a job only in economic terms. Certainly the economics of unemployment are deleterious enough, but financial difficulties are not the only problems facing the terminated. Joblessness will gnaw at your innards in insidious ways that would surprise those who have not experienced it first hand. Here are ten of my favorites:

1. No matter the reason you lost your job, you can't help but feel that you have somehow failed yourself, your family, and your potential. This may not be fair, but it's natural, and it may be unavoidable. The trick is to use your feeling of inadequacy against itself. I mean, if you are the big loser you think yourself to be, then what you think is naturally suspect and you shouldn't take it seriously. Seriously, this will work, but it's not easy...and it helps of you've already turned to strong drink for solace.
2. Feelings of inadequacy and depression make it that much harder to get another job. Say you score an interview, and it is scheduled for a day when you are feeling particularly down on yourself. (In a relatively short period of time, this will be every day.) The interviewer asks you some stupid question, the purpose of which is to see how good a liar you are—something like 'where do you see yourself in five years?' The answer that leaps immediately into your confidence-starved brain is something like 'still sucking up to a snot-nosed diesel douche like you,' and the despair engendered by this thought will take root and flourish so that it will be impossible to come up with the kind of lie that will get you the job you suddenly realize you are not worthy of anyway.
3. Your creditors will not be sympathetic. They will immediately begin to take advantage of your inability to pay them by charging you enormous fees and raising your interest rates into the stratosphere. (How convenient for the banks that the financial lobby managed to get most usury laws repealed before they crashed the system and drove so many of us to the brink of ruin.) When you try to cut your expenses by canceling their services, you will be forced to pay burdensome cancellation charges. If you protest, they will talk to you like you are a deadbeat. After a while you will begin to accept this as your due.
4. If you elect to take advantage of the COBRA provisions to keep your health insurance in force, you will find that it costs you double what you were paying when you had a job. Unemployment compensation is not enough to cover this. You can't pay your mortgage and your health insurance too. There is no kind of math that makes this work—not even the math that Wall Street used to tell them that securitized sub-prime mortgages were a safe investment. If you get sick, you are screwed. All the depression, anxiety, and self-loathing that have come to roost in the cobwebbed recesses of your psyche make it that much more likely that you will, in fact, get sick.
5. Unemployment compensation is not enough to keep your boat afloat, especially since all the providers you are used to doing business with are taking advantage of your unfortunate situation to enrich themselves before you go belly up. Your expenses will go up instead of down. The only expenses you will have any control over are food and cable TV. Ironically these are only the two things that are keeping your depression from lurching across the border into Suicideland. How are you supposed to stay upbeat and positive when you are forced to give up your daily ration of chocolate covered pretzels while you watch the Real Housewives of Swankville bicker about who said what to whom while they are drinking wine and getting a group Brazilian bikini wax at some high-dollar spa?
6. You will suddenly become aware of a gaggle of bozos who think that drawing unemployment is the same as being paid not to work. They resent your lazy, shiftless, scheming, system-scamming ass because they think that while they are at work, you are using their hard earned tax dollars to put fuel in your yacht. They are everywhere, posting comments, writing letters to editors, phoning into radio talk shows to shout out kudos and dittos. You will rightly wonder why people that ignorant have jobs while you do not. While you are wondering this, they are making campaign contributions to candidates who are promising to put an end to extended unemployment benefits and anything that looks like a real economic stimulus. They want to run you out of options. They don't really care if you get another job. They certainly aren't going to spend any money to help make another job available. Only by dying will you cease to be a drain on their resources. After a while it will seem as if this is their true aim...to kill you. They are too cheap though to buy bullets and make quick work of it. They want you to go quietly on your own nickel.
7. The elected officials that you hope will fix the problems of the larger economy, the problems that are keeping jobs in short supply, are instead busy chasing skirts, tapping their feet under the stall dividers in public restrooms, texting inappropriate messages to their constituents, engaging prostitutes to help them maintain their legislative focus, and e-mailing pictures of their genitalia to further clog the bandwidth of cyberspace. As with the self-proclaimed voices of reason in number 6 above, you will rightly wonder why people this ignorant have jobs while you do not. You will think briefly about running for Congress, but you quickly realize that nobody wants to run a candidate who doesn't have a job. They think something must be wrong with you. Perverts, apparently, are harder to vet.
8. Criminal activity begins to look more and more like a viable career path. Not only are there few barriers to entry, no inane job interviews, no credit checks, no hoops to jump through, but the downside to failure is better than the lifestyle you are currently enjoying. If you get caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison, you have free room and board, free medical care, and free cable TV. This beats hell out of the cardboard box under a bridge that seems to be in your future otherwise. In addition, if the powers that be ever get around to prosecuting the Wall Street bankers for their complicity in stripping the wealth and livelihood of the middle class, you may even get a cellmate who can regale you with tales of unimaginable decadence. When the Geezer Bandit begins to look like a sage old life coach, you are well on the way to making sense of your life again. Best keep it to yourself though.
9. If you are a husband and your wife is still working, you are going to have to man up and become the woman of the house. This is only fair. In time you will realize that suffering the abuse of a churlish boss or the mind-numbing drudgery of yet another meeting is exactly as mentally depleting as cleaning the bathroom or folding underwear. The problem is not that these tasks are difficult. It's rather that they never end. You are never finished with them, and neither was your wife except that she had to do them after she got home from work. When that little tidbit sinks in, you suddenly realize that you owe your wife a huge debt of gratitude and probably an apology for taking her for granted—the kind of apology that demands to be accompanied by jewelry. The irony is that, to do right by her, you will now have to use the money your wife earns to bring the bling. Better perhaps to just put another load in the washer and try to come up with something tasty for dinner.
10. When holidays and birthdays come around, you have to look the people you love most in the world directly in the eye and explain to them how sorry you are that they are pinned to your worthless coattails. Gifts are a luxury you can no longer afford. When they pat you on the back and tell you not to worry, they understand, this will only make it worse for you. This is the moment when, finally, you understand the value of life insurance. It's unfortunate that there's only one way to realize that value. Luckily, your don't have to take matters into your own hands. You can just wait for the angry clowns in number 6 to come hunting for you.

Day 44 - Bad Breath Bud

          My fever was finally down this morning, and I’m feeling a lot better today—probably because I hardly got out of bed the last two days. After a hot shower and a big breakfast I felt like a new man. Sadly, while I am feeling much better, we found out that our foster greyhound, Bud, has osteosarcoma. Prognosis is the worst.

          We’ve had a greyhound for 8 years. Her name is Sandy. She is a pretty little brindle with a sweet disposition. The foster dog, Bud, was bounced by the couple who had him for 9 years. I don’t know how they could do that, but they did. Bud is eleven. We’ve only had him a few months. The couple bought a big motor home last year, a 45 foot bus conversion with every conceivable bell and whistle. I know those things go for upwards of a million dollars. They want to sell their house and travel full time. According to them Bud didn’t like the bus. He spent all his time aboard cowering in a corner, whimpering. Maybe they were right to give him up under the circumstances. I just don’t think I could have done it, and I don’t consider myself to be a particularly sentimental kind of person.

          Bud is a big goofy boy with a prodigious overbite—a condition called ‘parrot jaw’ in greyhounds that keeps him from being able to completely close his mouth. That’s not entirely accurate. He can close his mouth, but the front teeth and the roof of his upper jaw are not covered by his lower jaw when his mouth is closed. There is a gap of a little over an inch. The results are twofold. First when Bud chews his food, crumbs spray everywhere. He is the messiest eater I have ever seen. Couple this with the fact that he adores crisp dry treats and kibble, and we are going to have to enclose his food bowl in plywood and plastic sheeting like a construction site. The other and perhaps even less entertaining result is that Bud has breath that would stop an eight day clock. Honestly, if most UFO sightings can actually be attributed to swamp gas, Bud has the capacity to launch an entire alien invasion fleet complete with battle stars.

          When we picked him up at the couple’s house we sat amongst piles of clutter and detritus and discussed Bud’s needs and habits, or at least tried to. The woman, let’s call her Kelly, seemed more interested in talking about the motor home and their pending travels while the man seemed more interested in making sure that I was a good Republican. Presumably Bud would not tolerate any liberal leanings.

Kelly passed the  clutter and detritus off as preparation for the upcoming transition to full time motor homing. I didn’t see anything that I would take on a bus, but I kept my mouth shut. I know a little about boats and I know a little about motor homes, so I also know a little about traveling in cramped spaces. While a 45 foot bus makes a big motor home, when you load it up with two people and the stuff they need for an extended road trip it becomes a small, small space that will elicit homicidal tendencies among the passengers if very much stowage space is given over to useless stuff. This home was packed to the gills with useless stuff that I knew very well was not going to be loaded into their bus.

          Before we left with Bud we took him for a walk. I don’t know why dog people do this. I suppose it’s a good way to get to know a dog on neutral ground. Everyone does it though. When you go to a Greyhound Pets of America facility to arrange to adopt a dog they have you take the dog out for a walk. When you go to PetSmart and they’re having an adoptable pet ‘meet-n-greet’ and you express an interest in one of the available dogs, they have you take it for a walk. When Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, goes to a house to fix a dog’s aberrant behaviors the first thing he does with the dog is take it for a walk. In this case though, I already knew that we were taking Bud to foster. I also knew that I liked Bud in spite of his breath. The only thing I was going to determine from walking him was whether or not he would pull on the leash.

          He did not pull on the leash. Bud’s hindquarters were so eaten up and atrophied from arthritis and lack of exercise that he would have struggled to pull one of those inchworm toys across the floor. Bud was going to need some attention to keep him from becoming a complete invalid. Near as we could tell he had never been walked on a regular basis. He was turned out into the back yard to do his business and let back into the house when he was finished.
     Greyhounds do not thrive on a lack of regimen. They love to run, but they need room to do it, and even when they have the room they don’t do it very much. Born sprinters, racing greyhounds run full out for about 45 seconds; then they rest up for their next race by sleeping 18 to 20 hours a day.

Confined to a small space and suffering from the discomfort of arthritis a greyhound will not exercise at all. Bud needed to be exercised. Gradually lengthening walks on the leash would build up his strength, stamina, and interest in life.

We started walking Bud the very next day. He was a willing participant. Weak as he was in his hips, I thought he would be reluctant to walk on the leash. Instead he loved it. He took to the neighborhood right away. We have a lot of small children, and they have always been fascinated by our dogs and our dogs by them. Bud loved the little girls especially. He would tolerate their pawing and fawning and hugs as long as they cared to go on. Of course this wasn’t usually very long. Little girls have short attention spans, and Bud is cursed with that egregious breath.

Within a couple of days Bud was showing new signs of exuberance. In the house he would bounce and bark and throw stuffed toys in the air to engage our other hound, Sandy, in play. Outside he was enthused about our walks, and always wanted to go further than we thought it prudent to take him.

After we’d had Bud a couple of weeks we loaded him in the van and took him to meet Kelly. She had a bed and some other of his things that she thought we could use. We met her in the parking lot of a strip mall between her house and ours. When we opened the doors of our van to load the stuff in, Bud didn’t even lift his head to acknowledge the woman who had housed, fed, and cared for him for 9 years. Kelly thought that was extremely unusual, but secretly I had to take Bud’s side in this. I didn’t like her either.

Day 36 - Trading Catatonia with the IRS

          I had lots of discomfort and lots of blood in my urine today. Thank God for the spanking new bottle of hydrocodone. Kelly Ripa was looking spectacular this morning, but not so good that I didn’t get up and go take a nap in the middle of the show. It takes a little medication for me to get interested in Kelly, but just a little too much and I’m right off her again. There’s a delicate balance involved.

In my wooly youth there was an underground comic I used to enjoy about a bunch of inveterate stoners called “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.” At some point they developed a kind of life maxim that was repeated frequently in the comic and eventually became a cult mantra for the times: “Dope gets you through times of no money better than money gets you through times of no dope.” Leaving aside the relative truth or fallacy of that particular statement, there is often a relationship between dissimilar objects like dope and money or hydrocodone and Kelly Ripa or drudgery and leisure that needs to be maintained within a narrow range of ratios in order to work at an acceptable level of satisfaction. Now that I’m out of work and having to take medication to moderate my various pains, I’m finding a lot of my ratios are getting out of whack. Hopefully something will happen soon to reestablish some semblance of order and balance.

*****

I owe the IRS a million three?? I guess it could be worse.

I lost ten times that much in my trading account in the last 20 minutes.

          My reveries today went back to Henry and all the abuse and injustice associated with working for him. In spite of his affronts to good manners and decency he was always interesting, especially when considered next to the anal bozos I have worked for since. Henry was a megalomaniacal sociopath, but he was always direct and unapologetic about it. For this reason he was almost entirely predictable. For instance when he stiffed my wife on the $30,000 real estate commission I knew he was going to do it and warned my wife to get a written contract before she set out to sell his house.

“He promised,” she said, and so he did. In the end though, when he betrayed her trust, broke his promise, and cheated her out of her livelihood, it was just ‘bidness.’ It was entirely within the norm of Henry behavior not only to stiff her on the commission, but to be surprised and a little hurt when she got angry about it.

          When Henry said he loved me the day I almost killed him, I have no doubt that he believed it. Henry had no idea what love is, but, to the extent that he was capable of experiencing emotions and affixing labels to them, however bizarre to the rest of us mortals, what he felt for me and my wife was genuine affection. Now that we are not associated with him on a daily basis, he will not ever think of us again unless there is some immediate benefit available to him in the reaching out. When such a situation presents itself to him however, we will be the first people he thinks of. That’s about as much as one can hope for from Henry.

           Henry used to delight in telling people I was the only person on the planet that he trusted enough to grant power of attorney over all his affairs. That he had not actually done so did not trouble him very much, or me either for that matter. He had given me power of attorney over his income tax issues, and probably that was close enough to ‘all his affairs’ for Henry as tax matters occupied a large percentage of his psychic energy. Henry was one of those people who would rather lose a thousand dollars of real money to real crooks than give up a hundred dollars to the IRS. Fortunately for him I was able to pull his fat out of the fire several times when it came to his taxes.

Henry never really appreciated what I actually did for him, but he did appreciate what he thought I did for him, which was keep him from having to pay any taxes. I didn’t really have much to do with that happy state of affairs. The real reason Henry didn’t have to pay any taxes was that he never made any money. He was an appallingly bad businessman—completely clueless in the intricacies of managing his assets to generate profits and positive cash flow. He was however a master of leverage, and what he managed to do was build a huge and precariously balanced house of cards on credit. He was always one deal away from disaster, and he took us all to live with him on the bloody edge of the precipice.

          What I actually did for Henry was not nearly so exciting, but was, at times at least, immensely satisfying. One such occasion had to do with an IRS audit. No one likes to get audited—especially Henry. He was so completely and naturally larcenous at heart that he couldn’t imagine getting through an audit unscathed. In addition to that, he did not trust the IRS or any of the agents in its employ to deal fairly with him—not since he had admitted to a female agent (long before I met him) that he was knocking down cash, and she had the brass to bring him up on charges.

          The real irony in that particular incident was that Henry had admitted to the impropriety, not out of contrition or even because he thought that he was about to be found out, but rather because he believed that the female agent would be so impressed with his resourcefulness and temerity that she would consent to sleep with him. He did it to get laid, but instead he got screwed. That at least was Henry’s take on it. I would love to talk to the agent and hear what she has to say about it. I imagine that it is, for her, a tale that grows larger and sweeter with each telling.

          So when Henry got the notice that he was going to be audited again he rushed down to my office, threw the envelope on my desk, and told me to handle it. Henry did not want to confront or be confronted by anyone from IRS. He just wanted me to make the whole thing go away.

          The auditor turned out to be another woman. I’d dealt with a number of auditors in various capacities at that point in my career. I thought that I was batting a thousand with them. That is most of the audits I’d been involved in had resulted in a ‘no change’ finding, meaning no additional tax due, and those that had not, amounted to not more that a few dollars each—essentially the same result. My opinion of the process and of the agents involved was this: an audit is meant to be fair, and the auditors who conduct them are just regular people trying to do a difficult and tedious job in which they are usually regarded with fear and loathing. Always I had treated the agents and auditors with whom I dealt with consideration and respect. They had done the same with me.

          This new auditor however seemed to be cut from different cloth. She was as unattractive and disagreeable a person as I had ever had to deal with. She was not just unfriendly. She was imperious. She was beyond the reach of such charm as I had managed to develop to that point in my life. She would not be led. She would not be cajoled. She would not be persuaded by reason, logic, or even by beautiful reports. She was a plodder, so I let her plod.

          It took forever. She examined every aspect of our business for the previous three years. She looked at payroll records, bank records, financial statements, invoices, receipts, notices and minutes of the board of directors. If it was on a piece of paper she looked at it. She said not one word about any of it—not to me at any rate. I assumed that she had found nothing to discuss. I knew that our returns were true and complete and supported by the underlying books and records. I knew we were clean as a whistle because it was my job to make sure that we were. That was the only way I was going to keep Henry out of jail, and keeping him out of jail, if you will remember, had been his sole mandate to me.

          Still the agent plodded on, and I began to suspect that she was hiding out with us. She either didn’t want to go back to the office or she didn’t want to start the audit they had scheduled next for her, so she was going to drag our audit out until they reassigned her next job. I couldn’t imagine why else she was taking so long to conduct what should have been a routine examination.

          It took six weeks to get my answer. After an absence of several days the auditor called to tell me she had finished a draft of the final audit report, and wanted to review it with me. We made an appointment for the following day. She showed up in her usual grumpy mood and started off our meeting by telling me that her final additional assessment of tax was going to be $1.3 million. I pretended not to be alarmed, which was actually pretty easy because all of my synapses and all of my vital organs had shut down the second she mentioned $1.3 million. It is an easy matter not to register surprise when you are catatonic.

          She gave me a copy of her report. My immediate plan was to hide in a closet until after closing time, and then to get into my car and drive to Argentina. I didn’t know if the U.S. had an extradition treaty with Argentina or not. It was not a fully developed plan. I looked at the paper she had handed me. It was an IRS form, a fill in the blanks form with spaces for the essential findings, the applicable code sections, the amount of the related assessment, and so forth. I needed to get Henry to sign it to finalize the outcome. The entries on the form were made by hand in a tightly crabbed block print so tiny I needed a magnifying glass to read most of it. I looked at the assessment. $1.3 million is a huge number—maybe not to the investment bankers and Wall Street traders who are largely responsible for our current financial crisis, but then, to Henry and me at any rate, it was an astronomical sum. Henry was going to have a stroke.

I looked at the reason for the assessment. The auditor had asserted that Henry had taken deductions for losses in excess of his basis. I stopped and read that part again. I knew that was wrong. I sat down and waited for my vital organs to reboot. It took several minutes.

          I had set Henry’s company up as what is known as an S Corporation. An S Corporation is a special kind of corporation that is taxed as if it were a partnership. That means that instead of the corporation paying any income tax, the corporation’s income and losses are passed through to the stockholders and reported on their individual tax returns. Henry’s corporation had only spun losses, so Henry, the sole stockholder, had deducted the company’s loss each year from his other income to arrive at the adjusted gross income on his Form 1040. When I say that Henry deducted the losses, I mean of course that I did it for him when I prepared his annual returns.

Now there is a limit to the amount of losses that a stockholder in an S Corporation may take, and that limit is the amount of money the stockholder has actually invested in the company. This is called his basis. The basis is adjusted upwards for any profits passed through to the stockholder and downwards for any distributions of cash or property taken out of the company by the stockholder. The loss deductions taken by the stockholder in total may not exceed the stockholder’s adjusted basis. This sounds complicated but it is actually very simple. It is also something that I took a great deal of care to calculate correctly each year. I knew that the auditor was wrong.

          I went down to the office she was using, and asked to see her calculation of the adjusted basis. As soon as she showed it to me I knew what she had done. She had started with the adjusted basis at the end of the period under audit—a number from which the distributions Henry had taken had already been deducted. Then she deducted the total of all the distributions that Henry had taken. She had in effect reduced his basis twice by his distributions. Her math was wrong. I tried to put on a considered and avuncular air. This is hard to do when your ego is turning cartwheels as if you had just checkmated Bobby Fischer or stripped a basketball from LeBron James. Still, as gently as possible under the circumstances, I pointed out the error in calculation to the auditor.

She didn’t register any surprise or alarm. I suspect that this was because all her vital organs had just shut down. I knew just how she felt. She’d walked in there with a $1.3 million assessment under her belt. She thought she was going to be a big hero back at the office. She thought that she was taking down a big player who’d already copped to a felony evasion charge. Her career was made one minute, and then, thanks to me, in the next minute—not so much.

She sat looking at the offending calculation for about 30 seconds, after which she uttered a single word: “Oh.” Then she packed all her work papers and schedules into her valise and left. I got a ‘no change’ notice the following week. Henry thought that was just as it should be, and he was right.

Day 32 - Closing a Chapter

          Gary and I finished up the closing early today. I showed Gary where all the reports reside on the computer and how to access and update them. We even reconciled the borrowing base and submitted that to corporate three days early. I left at lunch time, happy to be shed of the place at last.

I’m anxious to get on with my life now. The last few weeks, winding down an already closed chapter, have been like wasted time to me. If I hadn’t been sick and drugged most of the time it would have been even more frustrating than it was. I shook Bill’s hand on my way out. It seemed like a mature thing to do at the time, but I didn’t feel any more mature for having done it. I wonder how Bill felt about it. We’ve actually been through quite a bit together in the relatively short time we’ve been associated. I thought we had a pretty good rapport right up until the end, when Bill decided to reveal his truer nature. I wonder if he really will miss me, or, in his alternative universe, if he’s told Threasher that he’d like to snatch me out of my car at a stop light and beat the crap out of me.

          My physical condition has improved modestly throughout the week. My fever is all but gone, and the pain is bearable without medication. I’ve got another lithotripsy next week—hopefully the last one. By the end of the month I should be feeling great and ready to tackle the job hunt with the energy it requires. At that point I’ll only have three months of severance left. It seems like plenty, but the economy is tanking all around me. Every day the news is full of economic woes of mind-boggling proportion. That can’t bode well for my prospects.

Day 31 - Toiling Away, but Adding no Value

          Today was like yesterday only more so. Gary waxed eloquent about how much he appreciated my coming in to help him wade through the closing process. It’s not like anything he’s ever seen before. I knew it wouldn’t be. It’s not like anything anyone’s ever seen before. What we deal with, what I had to deal with, is a joke among accounting systems. IT sales people used to call me up several times a month to try to sell me a new system. All those software and systems decisions were made at our corporate headquarters in Kentucky, but I always liked to talk to the sales people to see what was available and dream about how nice it would be if I could actually buy it and if it actually worked as advertized. They would always ask what apps we were using. When I would tell them, they had never heard of it. That tells you something about how antiquated and obscure our systems were.

Everything we had and everything we did related to our accounting systems was the direct result of someone trying to get by as cheaply as possible. I’ve seen a lot of this over the course of 30 years. Everybody wants to get by on the cheap when it comes to functions that are seen as non-essential or non value added. Accounting often gets short changed…and systems as well. It wasn’t until some smart software developers figured out a way to bundle the sales function into enterprise software that companies started really parting with huge money for their IT solutions. When it was just accounting they couldn’t care less. The systems lag brought on by cheapness really gets telling when companies with suddenly heightened expectations like ours start trying to get 21^st century results out of 20^th century software. I had just got out of this situation—although not by choice. Gary was now in the thick of the struggle.

Henry, my old boss, the one I would’a, could’a, should’a killed, was like that too when it came to accounting and accountants. He even thought the engineers were a useless lot. He once said to me, “Engineers and accountants—all they ever do is fiddlefrick around.” He was building custom, luxury watercraft that sold from $400,000 to over a million dollars apiece, and he tried to skimp on the engineering. Then he was surprised when his boats kept catching on fire.

I’m still feeling awful, but not getting any worse. I should probably go to the doctor, but I’ve got stuff to do and, like I said, I’m not getting any worse. Three more days and we’ll have the closing in the bag. I’ll be done with work for a while. I can quit thinking about and worrying about the place that cut me adrift because they needed someone to blame for their own inadequacies. I wonder if anyone even cares that I’m doing the honorable thing here by staying around to make sure Gary doesn’t miss a beat taking over my job. Probably not—certainly not Fritz who’s probably busy congratulating himself that Gary didn’t bolt like the other guy. I wonder if he knows how pissed off Gary is about having to do a physical inventory at the end of the month. Apparently Fritz forgot to tell Gary that fascinating little detail about his new job. It turns out that Gary hates inventories almost as much as I do. 

Day 30 - Agony and Ivory

          The closing has to be done by Friday at the latest. Gary wants to beat the deadline. I’ve helped not at all so far. I knew I needed to go in today no matter how bad I felt. My fever was down to 99 and change. I was trying to manage it by alternating acetaminophen and aspirin. I took some hydrocodone to work with me in case the pain got unbearable. I figured If I had to take it I would get my wife to come and pick me up rather than drive home stoned.

          Gary had made good progress in my absence. Helen was a big help in this regard. She and the accounts receivable girl finished the sales schedule, so Gary was ready for me to show him how to lay in the costs of the units sold.

The system breaks costs out into standard and actual labor, overhead, and materials components. We have to go get those costs out of the system and load them into a spreadsheet. We have to do this because there are a lot of other components to cost that the system does not track on a per unit basis. We end up with a spreadsheet that is about 100 columns wide, where each line contains every aspect of the sale, delivery, commission, costs and cost variances, fees, advertizing components, and titling for an individual unit sold. It is hopelessly convoluted and totally ridiculous—not because we have to accumulate all that information, but rather because we have to do it manually.

My predecessor used to key all this data into a spreadsheet by hand. He could key this stuff faster than anyone I have ever seen. He could key a table of numbers faster than my wife can type which is about 110 words per minute. Still I was able to knock about two days off his best closing time because I wasn’t about to key anything I didn’t have to. I found a way to copy and paste back and forth between the spreadsheets and the system to speed up data queries and data entry. It’s still convoluted as hell, but the typing is practically eliminated. Not only that; the potential for making errors in the midst of all that furious typing is reduced to almost nil. This is my real utility to Gary, and the longer we were working at it the more he began, finally, to appreciate that I have come to help him.

By lunchtime my temperature had started edging up again and the pain was raging in my back. It felt like I had been stabbed in the spine with an elephant tusk. I was sweating, and I felt like hell, but I was also turning rapidly into Gary’s best friend in the whole world, which sort of made up for the discomfort. I decided to take a serious pill so I could at least be civil in the afternoon. In half an hour I was too loopy to be of much use, but by then we had got the schedule mostly whipped. Gary finished it easily while I watched. By the time we were finished, the pill had started to wear off and I was able to drive home in relative safety.

Day 29 - Ninja Accounting: assassination by the numbers

          Still sick. My temperature hit 103. I sipped ice water and popped hydrocodone, which has acetaminophen so it helped with the fever. Gary was not too happy with me, but I didn’t care very much at this point. I was still having flashbacks to former jobs. I don’t know why they all seem unpleasant looking back. I seem to remember enjoying work.

*****

          I almost killed a boss once. Let’s call him Henry. Henry had just gotten out of the hospital from a quadruple bypass. Before his heart attack he was a three pack a day smoker and a 12 cup a day coffee drinker. He used to hit the Dewar’s White Label pretty hard too, but he had mostly given that up to keep the peace with his wife. He was notorious for knocking down cash from his business—that is he would pocket a chunk of money from each transaction and keep it for himself. He used to do this on his own, but the IRS caught up with him, and he had to plead out to a felony tax evasion charge. That was before I met him. When he hired me he told me that my job was to keep him out of jail. I understood this to mean keeping him honest. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do.

          Henry still knocked down cash, but I recorded it as a loan to him from the company. If he didn’t pay it back it would become income to him or it would reduce his basis in his company. Either way it would end up having adverse tax consequences for him. None of these niceties disturbed Henry as long as he thought he was getting away with something. I was keeping him honest without him knowing it.

          Henry was a natural born salesman. He could sell anything. He had customers lined up to deal with him. There was something magical about it that I never understood. He was not gracious or charming or smooth. In fact he was usually the exact opposite of those, but somehow he exuded a brand of charisma that made people want to make him happy. The best way to do that was to buy something from him, especially if you managed to let Henry at least think he had the upper hand in the deal.

          While Henry was in the hospital the company was deprived of his charisma and sales fell off. Cash flow began to be a problem. I realized two things. We had deliveries coming up on which the customers had made substantial deposits. Henry had taken the deposits and banked them for himself. When we made the deliveries we were going to have to credit the customers for their deposits even though the company didn’t have the money. Henry had it. The bookkeeping would be honest, but we wouldn’t be getting sufficient cash from the transactions to fuel operations. And since we weren’t booking new sales we weren’t taking in any deposits on future deliveries. We were facing a cash crunch of disastrous proportions.

          To help weather the storm, I developed a comprehensive schedule of our cash position—our expected inflows and outflows. With this schedule we knew what we could pay and when, and when we were going to run out of money. I took this schedule to Henry at his home when he got out of the hospital. I pointed out to him the position we were in. I told him that in order to keep the company afloat he was going to have to pony up some of the cash from the deposits he had pocketed.

          Several hours later the Vice President and General Manager, a good friend of mine—let’s call him Mike—told me that he had talked to Henry on the phone and that Henry had said my cash flow schedule wasn’t “fit to wipe his ass with.” I was used to abuse from Henry at this point. He was forever abrasive and insensitive when things didn’t go his way. The magnitude of this particular calumny however was more than I could stand, especially under the circumstances where I had been trying to hold things together in his absence—an exercise that wouldn’t have been nearly so difficult if Henry didn’t have a larcenous heart. I don’t think that I have ever been angrier at work. I quit on the spot.

          We were having an open house at the time. It was an annual event where somewhere around 250 customers would show up for three days of seminars, entertainment, and meals, get tours of the plant and put their hands on our new product offerings. I was supposed to tend bar that evening at a catered steak dinner. I told Mike that I’d be back to pour drinks, but that was it. I packed up the personal stuff in my office and went home.

          When I returned at 6:00 to set up the open bar, Henry was roaming the hallways looking for me. I knew he would be.

          “There’s that boy I been looking for,” I heard him booming down the hall.

          He was in the Mike’s office. He came out into the hall and swept me in. He was expansive, full to bursting with good will and affection. He bowed his massive head and spread his hands like a penitent. He would have looked at home in sack cloth and ashes although I doubt he could have pried himself out of his Gucci loafers.

          “There’s my boy,” he said, a little quieter, trying to suffuse his tone with humility.

          “What’s the matter,” I asked, “did you run out of toilet paper.”

          He clutched his hands to his chest like I had wounded him grievously. He always liked a lot of histrionics. You couldn’t call him a drama queen. He was a great shaggy hulk of a man, craggy and gruff. He was a drama bear.

          “You know I never said such a thing,” he said.

          “I’m sure that you did,” I said. “It sounds just like you. Don’t stand there and expect me to believe that Mike made the whole thing up.”

          “Well I never meant it. We’ve been friends for a long time now. I love you like a brother. You love me too. I know you do.”

          “You are not my friend. You never have been. You’re too full up with self interest and greed to love anyone. All you’ve got to offer is a lot of abuse and broken promises. The only reason you ever got close to anyone was to take advantage or them or cheat them out of something.”

          “That’s not fair,” Henry was really laying on the aggrieved act now. “Name one time.”

          “For starters how about that $30,000 real estate commission you stiffed my wife for?” I said. I knew I had him there.
          “You can’t still be mad about that! That was 6 months ago. It’s high time you let that go. It didn’t mean nothing personal. I still love you, and Mazie too. It was just bidness.”

          That was his favorite excuse for some particularly sleazy bit of chicanery. He’d used it several times with me when I was trying to get him to be more honest than his nature generally allowed. “It’s just bidness” meant there’s money involved so any lack of propriety is completely excusable. When he said it this time, I decided he needed a real dressing down. I took a couple of strides and got right up in his face. He’s a lot bigger than me. I mean a lot. He’s a good 8 inches taller and 125 pounds heavier than I am. I was shouting right up his nose.

I started recounting every slight, every petty cheat, conniving trick, scam, broken promise, bald faced lie, and betrayal he ever committed. Not really every one, just the ones I knew about, but even those were legion. I never stopped for air. I never gave him a space to jump in and defend himself. I doubt if I have ever been as formidable. He had nowhere to go, and he needed to go somewhere desperately. He needed at least to sit down. The onslaught was too much for his heart in its weakened condition. Just standing there listening to me recount his failings as a human being was undoing him in a major way. His stitched up aorta was failing under the pressure. He went grey and pallid. He began to weave on his feet. His eyes were glassy. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead and alongside his bulbous and vein tracked nose. He was about to go down.

          I thought to myself at that point that if I kept at him he was going to die, that if I didn’t let up and he had to stand there until he fell over that I would be responsible for his death. I knew in that instant that I could kill him just by yelling. I liked the feeling that gave me. It was very empowering. I’d never felt quite like that in my entire life. I’d been taking abuse, swallowing injustice, putting up with crap my whole career, and now I could make up for a lot of it—not all of it, but a lot—in a few minutes of lethal venting. I really wanted to.

In the end I couldn’t keep after him. I’m an accountant, not an assassin. I couldn’t have blood on my hands, no matter how much the bastard might deserve to die. I’ve never been in sales where absolutes are only momentary and ethical considerations are only considered in relativistic ways. Accountants are supposed to live at the moral center of the business world. We are the conscience, the soul, a force for truth and justice in the world of business. That’s why I got into accounting in the first place. God knows I hated math and numbers my whole life. I became an accountant because accountants tell the truth. It’s their job—except of course for the ones who lie, but that’s a whole other story.
           So I let Henry live. His health improved over time, and he returned to a semblance of his former self. That he went on to screw people, me included, in myriads of creative ways, that his return to 'bidness as usual' was more complete than his return to physical health...well that was just my own damn fault. 

Day 26 - The Long and Short of It

          I made it to work today even though I didn’t feel much better. I had an appointment with the urologist in the afternoon, so I was determined to put in an appearance to meet my replacement.

          The replacement’s name is Gary. The first thing I noticed was that he is younger and better looking than I. The women who used to work for me will, I’m sure, enjoy working for Gary more, at least provided he is not a jerk. He was quite personable and seemed genuinely concerned about the state of my health. Of course if I don’t get well in time for the closing, Wallace will have to come to help him. Gary will be screwed.

          We spent a couple of hours going over all my work files in the computer. I showed him where everything is, how it’s all organized, and what it’s all used for. He took copious notes. I showed him the previous month’s closing. While I was at the doctor’s office this afternoon, he was going to work his way through last month’s workpapers and compare them to the templates I left him. We will go over his questions tomorrow. It’s a good plan I think. It’s the way I would have gone about it if I were him. I decided that he’s a smart enough fellow.

          Two things about Gary were noteworthy to me—not because they mean anything necessarily, but I have seen them in the past and made note of them because of the individuals to which they attached. First, Gary rolls the sleeves of his shirt to the inside. That is rather than rolling up his sleeves by turning the cuffs outward, he turns the cuffs inward. This makes a neater presentation, but it also means that whatever ink stains, pencil dust, and other detritus of desk work one picks up on one's sleeves will be on the outside and therefore impossible to hide by merely rolling the sleeves back down. This practice is best left to the more fastidious among us, to those less likely to drag their sleeves through the residue of accounting toil. The second thing Gary does is wear a fat gold chain around his neck.

          I have to say before I go further that I used to do both these things. The first controller I ever met did both these things. He worked for a small hospital where I got my first accounting job fresh out of college. I didn’t work for him. I was attached to an independent treatment facility that leased space in the hospital. I was in my twenties. He was pushing fifty. He seemed to have everything going his way. He was a stylish gent—salt and pepper temples on immaculately sculpted hair, nicely coordinated clothes, a well appointed home in a fashionable neighborhood, a chocolate brown Jaguar sedan with a tan leather interior, all the trappings. I started trying to emulate him almost immediately, unfortunately without the same effect. After a while I gave it up, rolled my sleeves like a normal slob, took off the gold chains, and resigned myself to an innate lack of star quality.

          Some years later I ran into another controller who rolled his sleeves just so and wore a gold chain. He also was pushing fifty (so was I by this point) although he was not the same trim fashion plate that the first guy had been. This second fellow had developed an infatuation with a dancer at a local topless bar. He began squiring her around the area malls on week-end afternoons, buying her clothes and baubles and, eventually, a car. That he could not afford these inducements did not dissuade or even slow him down. What did slow him down was getting arrested for embezzling some sixty thousand dollars from his employer to pay for the inducements that presumably never actually induced the girl to give up any favors. Since then I have never trusted accountants who try to dress too cool or wear gold chains. Accountants ought to wear conservative suits in charcoal and navy with striped ties. If they have a taste for the fashionable that won’t be ignored, they can add cuff links and a pocket square. Anything else is just asking for trouble.

          The doctor got another x-ray and a urinalysis. He decided that the stint was causing all the pain. Not unusual, and nothing to be alarmed about. He decided that I had passed enough sand that he could take the stint out. I could do it with or without anesthesia. If I did it with, I’d have to come back tomorrow. The thought of doing it without gave me the heebie-jeebies. I shuddered just thinking about it. Unfortunately that was the only option that made any sense time-wise. I told him to take it out without anesthesia.

          I had to put the silly little hospital gown on again. Then they took me into a room I hadn’t seen before with a nurse I hadn’t met to get prepped. Prepping consisted of soaking my private parts with an antiseptic solution. This went on way longer than I would have imagined necessary, but the last time this was done I was asleep so I don’t really know.

The nurse was pleasant, plump Jamaican woman of a certain age. When she finished with the washing she covered me with a surgical drape that had a hole cut out in the center so that only my private parts are visible. She went to tell the doctor that I was ready. I was lying on a table covered up, except of course for the stuff that I would like most to be covered up, and wondering what there might be to prevent just anybody from walking in there and seeing me like that. I have to say it was very disconcerting.

The nurse came back a few minutes later to tell me that the doctor was in the middle of another procedure and that it would be a few minutes longer before he could attend to me. Through the walls I heard voices and the staccato clicking of the lithotripsy machine blasting someone else’s stones.

The nurse asked me if I was warm enough. In fact my private parts were freezing. I imagined that they had shrunk up deep into my abdominal cavity, seeking their own warmth, and that the doctor would probably have to waste 5 or 10 minutes just trying to find them before he could go in after the stint. I wasn’t sure of the best way to convey this information to the nurse. She had just had my junk in her hands, so it seemed important to me to seem calm, collected, informal and free of embarrassment without lapsing into the vulgar. I decided on a particular phraseology that I do not normally use.

“Everything except my willie,” I said. “My willie is freezing.”

The nurse chuckled at this. I thought that the term ‘willie’ must have made her think of Bill Clinton. I don’t know why I thought this, but there it was. Slick Willie—limp, cold, and slathered in Betadine solution. It was not a proud moment.  

“Unfortunately that’s the one thing I can’t do anything about,” she said.

          The doctor came in ready to go to work. He used a cystoscope to go in after the stint. I knew that I didn’t want to see it, but I looked anyway because...well how could I not? A situation such as I was in is like a plane crash or a train wreck unfolding in front of you. You can’t make yourself look away, no matter what. If the cold had not shrunk my thing beyond finding, sight of the cystoscope was sure to finish the job. It was huge. It looked lethal. It reminded me of some bio-mechanical horror from a science fiction movie, something like the monster's telescoping jaw in The Alien. I closed my eyes. They squirted some topical anesthetic and lubrication into me to ease the passage of the scope.
         “You’ll probably feel a little pulling sensation,” the doctor said.

This was exactly what I felt, provided that what he meant by ‘pulling sensation’ was that I would feel like he had run the cable from a tow truck up my poor penis, attached it to the first thing he found on the other side of my bladder, and proceeded to pull my insides out foot by foot. When I first saw the x-rays of myself with the stint in, it seemed maybe 8 inches long. It curled into a small loop in my bladder on one end, and poked down into my kidney on the other. When the doctor pulled it out however, it suddenly turned into a garden hose—one of those thick rubber hoses, a 50 footer, complete with brass fittings and a twisty nozzle. I thought the hose, the ordeal, the discomfort would never end.

“All done,” the doctor said at long last.

I thought that little phrase, ‘all done’, did a grave injustice to the singular most remarkable feat of physical prowess I have ever accomplished.

Day 25 - Dreams of Kelly Ripa

          My replacement started today. I started out for work, but turned around and came home before I made it all the way there. I was having a lot of pain then, and I’m having a lot of pain still in spite of the excellent drugs. It started on Sunday afternoon, and has been intense and unrelenting ever since. The oxycodone is not managing the pain. At best it makes it so that I don’t care about the pain, but to get to this level of indifference requires doubling up on the dosage. I called work and told them that I wasn’t coming in. I called again and talked to Helen to let her know what’s up with me. I asked her to convey this information to my replacement. Hopefully he won’t worry about what he’s gotten himself into. It will be bad enough for him without having to worry about me.

          At home I popped pills, pushed fluids and watched daytime TV. My wife works at home. She does online transcription. She’s one of those people who stays busy all the time. She’s a card-carrying Type A personality. She doesn’t watch daytime TV. She thinks daytime TV is silly. She might be right, but in my current state I am not capable of undertaking anything more challenging. I try to be embarrassed about what I am watching, but embarrassment also seems to be beyond my capabilities.

          I have always liked the cheap and tawdry in entertainment. I like bad movies, professional wrestling, The Real Housewives of Orange County. The shallow and the vapid have a great deal of appeal for me. I like to be beat over the head with the obvious. I like a lot of scantily clad window dressing. I like raw emotion rooted in base instinct and ignorance. I like shallow water. I knew within a few short hours that I would be hooked on soap operas in a matter of days. I took two more pills and went to bed. I dreamed of Kelly Ripa.

          Sometime later the Oklahoma recruiter called and woke me up. My wife made excuses while I splashed cold water on my face in a vain attempt to get my pharmacologically compromised brain to focus. The Aerospace firm has decided on another candidate. They found someone locally—someone they wouldn’t have to relocate. My addled mind translated the unspoken and unvarnished truth. They found someone younger, cheaper, healthier, prettier, better educated, and more competent. I’m never going to get another job. I took another pill and went back to bed. Kelly Ripa did not reappear. Damn!

Day 22 - Breaking More Rocks

          The second lithotripsy was a breeze. It’s only been a week since the first one. Everything looks good. I can keep using the stint that’s already in there. I’ve had a little discomfort from the stint, but it’s easily managed with the fabulous batch of oxycodone that the urologist prescribed for the pain. I’m still getting some blood in my urine, but it’s diminished. The doctor got all the rest of the stones in the right kidney.

          Life is good. If I only had a job it’d be damn near perfect. I called the Oklahoma recruiter to see what’s up with the Aerospace firm. She promised to call me as soon as she hears something. I’m beginning to think that if they were interested I’d have heard something by now. It’s easy when you’ve been fired to get eaten up by self doubt. It doesn’t matter how arbitrary the decision or how unfairly you think you were treated. At some point you’re going to begin to think that you had it coming to you.

Everyone knows that companies use economic downturns, reorganizations and the like that result in lay-offs to get rid of the bottom ten percent—the least productive and most incompetent of employees. That’s what they’re supposed to do anyway. Because people with all their prejudices, imperfections and frailties ultimately make the decision as to who will get fired, companies often get rid of very good employees along with the legitimate culls. I know this is so because I’ve seen it happen time after time—not just to me. Still when you’re on the receiving end of a reduction in force, you have to think that someone in management must have felt that you were not pulling your weight. Somehow you have to rise above these feelings of inadequacy every day in order to function, in order to get another job, in order to get past the set-back. The longer you go without work, the harder it gets to stay upbeat about your value to the rest of the world. Trust me...I know.

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.