No Accountants Were Harmed in the Making of this Blog

          While I was traveling last week to visit, and ultimately to bury, my 90 year old mother who had suffered a devastating stroke, I got an e-mail telling me that someone had posted a reply to a comment I made at Going Concern. Going Concern is a blog that deals primarily with accountants and accounting issues. I started reading it early this year when it was full of news of the alleged accounting irregularities and possible audit failures surrounding the bankruptcy and collapse of Lehman Brothers in September of 2008.
          I like to post comments at Going Concern because I get a lot of readers for my blog from there—not enough to get me recognized anywhere and certainly not enough to add any cash to my coffers, but still a significant addition to my total traffic.
          This particular reader, the one who replied to my comment giving rise to the e-mail, took exception to some of my confessions of regrettable fiscal decisions that led to my filing bankruptcy. Here is the text of the e-mail, which includes the whole of the reply:


Jigaboo (unregistered) wrote, in response to jonahgibson:


I read your little blog ... you sound like an idiot. 20 years of credit card date [sic] at 23% +. Why, for the love of God, why would you not refinance???? This is an accounting website. You are hurting us here with your nonsense.


Link to comment: http://disq.us/fjz8d

          Notwithstanding that he is of course correct—I do sound like an idiot—I find it ironic that Jigaboo, who, hopefully at least, does not realize that his screen name is a racial slur and who apparently does not bother to check his text before he posts, thinks that my paltry bankruptcy and my few foolish decisions, all of which I have documented here, are actually injurious to accountants. I wonder whom, exactly, he thinks has been injured, and how.
          I would have hoped that Jigaboo understood that the point of my little blog—at least in the entry about my bankruptcy, which is the one to which he alludes—was precisely that I had made bad choices, that where I had managed other people's money as if it were my own, I had managed my own as if I were the federal government. I don't think that Jigaboo has read much of my blog. Otherwise he might not have called it 'little' and he might have had a better grasp on the often self-deprecating timbre of my posts. In fact, according to my reader stats, Jigaboo, who logs in from Brooklyn, has only read two or three pages of my blog and only spent a few minutes doing that. This is perhaps long enough to form a New York opinion, but one should consider that it was largely New York opinions that held Repo 105 transactions to be appropriate accounting.
          I think Jigaboo is wrong in his assessment of any damage I might have done to the accounting profession. I may have made some bad choices, and I may have undertaken to get myself out of the mess I'd got into in a manner entirely too late and unsatisfactory to him, but I have not committed 'nonsense' enough to do any injury to accountants in general or even to the concentration of Big 4 denizens and alumni who frequent Going Concern. They may have been hurt, but not by me.
          Accountants have been hurt by the kind of people who would never make the mistakes I've made. They've been hurt by the same arrogant, self-righteous bastards I've been talking about for nearly 100 entries now. They've been hurt by guys who are the opposite of me, the kind of guys who get their own finances right but play fast and loose with the money that belongs to the rest of us, the kind of guys who believe that it's their right to be 'too-big-to-fail' and who are more than happy to take taxpayer money to bail them out of the mess they created but don't want to accord the same benefits to anyone else.
          The damning evidence that they must have known they were doing wrong is that they used accounting legerdemain to hide their actions. Yet now they are content to take fat bonuses and to congratulate one another for getting away with it. These are the folks, their collective sense of entitlement pumped up on steroids and their collective conscience atrophied by lack of use, who remain unapologetic as they lobby for a regulatory status quo. Meanwhile the world is still trying climb out of the smoking wreckage that their mostly unregulated excesses brought us.
          Accountants have been hurt by these guys in the same ways that the rest of us have. They've seen their investment portfolios shrink to a fraction of their former worth. They've watched the value of their homes decline. They've seen their credit sources dry up. They've seen their livelihood put at risk by business declines everywhere.
          Accountants, though, have also suffered a blow to their credibility. Not very many people seem to trust accountants anymore—at least not to the extent they once did. Accounting has slid down in the rankings on the list of honored professions—and not just because it's so hard for accountants to get girls. Their integrity and their acumen have been splintered by broadside after broadside. It's not the investment bankers they have to thank for this either. It is the partners and managers at the top of the accounting profession, in the largest firms, with ostensibly the most to lose, who are to blame. These are the auditors who saw firsthand the accounting sleights and subterfuge being used to cover up the cancer in our financial institutions, and elected—elected mind you—to call it Kosher. They passed on fraud. They aided and abetted the crime. They took their fees and helped to hide the truth and now they want a pass themselves.
          My friend, Jigaboo, doesn't have much to say about these guys. My guess is that one day he'd like to be counted among their number. I think he aspires to be one of them. Why else would he be so adamant about protecting their precious reputations from nonsense such as mine? Why else would he be so keen to banish us idiots from discussing our failures in the same place where we profess to be accountants? Jigaboo wants to maintain the veneer of intelligence and acumen that will allow the next generation of accountants and auditors to abet the next generation of scalawags, and none of them will ever be jobless like me.
          So thank you very much, Jig. I appreciate your concern. I feel good that you are out there making the world safe for defenseless accountants who might otherwise be caught unawares by idiots and nonsense. I just think that you have missed the forest for concentrating on trees like me who have already been felled by the truly dangerous idiots among us.

Day 248 – Modern Communications

          Nelson has been complaining of pain in his back and shoulder. It started in his back, and he was convinced that it was sciatica. When it moved into his shoulder he became convinced that the physical therapist was overworking him. We got her to go easy on him for a few days, but the pain did not abate. Anne made him an appointment and took him to the doctor on Thursday last week. The doctor sent him for x-rays. As usual, Nelson undertook to make the rest of us suffer for this unexpected additional medical procedure. Anne bore the brunt of it because she was stuck in the car and in the waiting room with him.

          The results turned out to be bad news, although just how bad is yet to be determined. Among his other ailments, Nelson has prostate cancer. At his age this has not been particularly worrisome as prostate cancer is a slow moving disease and fairly easily contained with medication. The likelihood is that, at 89 years of age, Nelson is going to die from one of his other health problems before the cancer ever gets him.

          Unfortunately, this has turned out to be a contrary case. Apparently Nelson’s prostate cancer has metastasized into his spine, neck, and shoulder. The doctors want to do some additional tests, of course, to confirm, but this looks to be the issue underlying Nelson’s pain.

          There has been a lot of discussion back and forth between his daughters. Nelson’s daughters like to plan things in minute detail and well in advance—even things over which, realistically, they have no control. They just like to know what is going to happen and when. As a group they are responsible, caring, and sensitive to a fault, but they are not ideally suited to dealing with surprises. This new development has thrown them, and is requiring a lot of discussion in order for them to get their plans readjusted in their heads.

          I am reminded, perversely, of the time when my wife and her sisters discovered e-mail. E-mail represented a tremendous boon to their collectivity. It expanded their ability to keep up with one another by quantum bounds and was therefore cause for a lot of excitement among them. I was excited myself because I saw in e-mail a way for the ladies to increase their connections to one another and at the same time actually save money on long-distance telephone charges. Boy was I wrong.

          Here’s what happened. One of the lovely sisters would decide she needed to communicate something of relative importance to her sisters. She would carefully craft an e-mail and send it, often to all three of her sisters. Once she’d hit the send button she would commence to worry that somehow the missive had gotten lost in the labyrinth of wires, cables, and junctions that comprised the internet. She would fear that the message would not be received, or not be received timely, or, even worse, accidentally sent to a Donkey Kong screen in some remote Chuck E. Cheese pizza house where a raucous t-ball team was celebrating their first victory of the season.

Once the sister was sufficiently convinced that her message had indeed gone astray—a process that usually took about 20 minutes—she would begin making long distance calls to her sisters to see if they had received the e-mail. A lengthy discussion would then take place about the contents, the spelling, the things they might have forgotten to mention, and ending with heartfelt wonderment about the marvels of modern technology that allowed them to stay so connected. Indeed.

Anyway that’s what they’re all doing now, my wife and her sisters, calling and e-mailing one another, trying to work these new developments into their plans for the rest of Nelson’s life. Nelson just wants to be left alone. He’s not really interested in having cancer or not. I think he suspects the whole thing is just another elaborate trick being played on him by the growing number of doctors he’s offended in some way. He doesn’t feel any worse than he did yesterday, and that was plenty bad enough, thank you very much.

Death in the Family

My 90 year old mother passed away Friday afternoon after suffering a massive stroke on Monday. I'll not be able to update the blog regularly until after the funeral. Still making arrangements, but it will probably be Thursday, July 8, before I am back to my customary level of connectivity.

Thanks.