Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

My flight from Minneapolis didn’t land in Seattle until after midnight, due to snow and runway closures in that suburb of Lake Woebegone, and I didn’t walk into the house until about 1:15. 

Since there was no food served on the plane, and I didn’t have time  between planes to scarf pizza or something, I hit the fridge almost immediately after uploading the following three plane-crafted blog entries.  As soon as I opened the door, I was greeted with intermittent screeching not unlike that of exotically-plumed Amazonian birds.  The fridge is over 25 years old, and I think the problem is bearings failing on the compressor motor.

Odds are looking up for a not-fun weekend.

On the plane home tonight, I just finished reading The Time-Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger.  Time-travel is a tricky literary device.  Handled badly, the work gets bogged down in the mechanics and the story, when it gets a paragraph now and then, suffers for it.  This book, however, did very little explaining, and the story was so compelling that you began to take time-travel as a normal and expected fact of life.  It helps if the author has a deft touch with language, too. 

I was taken, for instance, with this passage.  In the book, Henry, the time-traveler, first meets Clare, his life-long love, when she is a child of about 10 and he’s an adult.  He exercises admirable forbearance as he meets her several times while she matures, until the day he and Clare are about to have sex for the first time.  Although it’s a picnic in the middle of a meadow, they’ve dressed formally:

I shrug off my jacket and undo the tie.  Clare kneels and we remove the studs deftly and with the concentration of a bomb squad.

And I can’t resist another, which occurs at an Iggy Pop concert:

she dances seriously, like lives are hanging in the balance, like precision dancing can save the starving children in India.

As I said, I bought completely into the seamless transitioning between linear existence and temporal hop-scotching, and sometimes, after I put the book down, I wasn’t sure that I was completely moored in the present, that I wasn’t watching myself from some detached remove.  This was reinforced a bit because I was visiting my mother last weekend, in the town and house I grew up in.

We were out for a walk one evening and we passed the intersection of East Boundary and Sixth Street.  I glanced up Sixth, first as a reflex because my high school girl friend (now wife) lived on Sixth.  As I did, my eyes came to rest on the curb a little way from the intersection, and for a moment I became unhinged in time a little bit.  That particular bit of curb is where we would pull over on the way between my house and hers to neck, and I swear I could see us in my dad’s Chevy station wagon, and I could smell the wool of her sweater and the perfume she wore at the time.

I was a couple classes ahead of her in school, and it seemed a little like Henry’s time-travelling when I would come home from college and take her out.  As I stood there last weekend, I also felt the grains of impatience that scratched at our vehicular pleasures, and I didn’t have the advantage that Henry had of knowing how sweetly things would turn out.

Okay, so here’s what’s turning out to be the most gratifying purchase from my shopping spree last week:

An accountant, like other laborers, develops an affinity for his tools, and for the accountant, at least the accountant of the mid-20th century, the one indispensable tool was the 10-key adding machine.  The firm that hired me out of college could not justify putting us out in the field until we had spent a month or so becoming adept at running a 10-key by touch.  There were days when we were assigned to sit with a phone book and run through columns of telephone numbers for practice. (I always questioned the efficacy of this drill, as I’ve yet to find a hash total in the phone book against which to check one’s accuracy).

In this profession, you get to really appreciate the feel of a nicely-designed keypad, and I used to gravitate towards certain brands or models when plunked down in an office without my own machine.

These days, the laptop is the primary tool of the itinerant accountant, for obvious reasons.  Sheafs of workpapers that we used to lug in Samsonite-sized leather cases are now stored on laptop hard disks and transmitted to the home office each night for safekeeping.  However, as one regards the admirable economy of the laptop keyboard, only the accountant may grieve the absence of that luxury of the desktop keyboard, the 10-key pad.  The laptop keyboard tries to fake one on the right side, where close inspection reveals the faint outline of numbers accessible by using the function key.  However, these keys are skewed and oddly placed, and no self-respecting (and technologically challenged) accountant would put himself through the heartache of actually learning how they work.  (I believe I tried it once, and then couldn’t get the keyboard switched back to its normal alphabetic function).

Imagine, then, my almost erotic delight upon seeing the item pictured below:

Even encased in its blister-pack, my twitching fingers could tell how it would feel, and longed to fit it to the end of my hand like a prosthesis.

Reader, I bought it, and slipped it lubriciously into my USB port, and we’ve been together ever since.

I started my accounting career as an auditor.  As a “junior” on a crew, I would have to scurry around our clients’ office bugging the crap out of people who had better things to do than provide a business education to a clueless dork who nonetheless felt that his newly minted college degree conferred an exalted status. 

We would arrive on a job, meet everyone, and give special strokes to the CFO or Controller, who was often an alumnus (escapee) of our firm.  As we worked, we would still stroke the CFO and take him to lunch (in those days, it was ALWAYS a “him”), but it usually became apparent in our quest for real information that the only reliable source was a “Louise” or “Madge”, a superannuated crone who occupied the least desirable real estate in the office, and we would tiptoe past the CFO’s office and besiege her hungrily.

At the end of the job, the bigwigs from our firm would come out and parlez with the CFO and obtain signoff for our work, we’d all shake hands and thank each other and be off to the next stop in the audit gulag.

Well, this week I’ve been the CFO-for-hire at my client’s during their audit, as their controller has had a sort of meltdown and is on extended “leave”.  And, despite my desperate attempts to please, I can’t help noticing the auditors busily plying Linda and Alena just outside my door.  I can’t say that I blame them, cuz if they came to me, I’d probably put them off and then sneak out and get the answers from Linda and Alena anyway.  However, they have yet to buy me lunch.

Off to a shaky start with these auditors.  I was just reading a schedule and mistook “Promissory Note” for “Promiscuity Note”.  And, no, I’m not working for Boeing.

Well, it’s taken me a while to beat my way past that wall.  Work’s been killing me, and maybe a little touch of depression and world-weariness.  I’ve really felt for the last couple of months that every second I have has a second and maybe third mortgage on it, and I’m playing a little shell game in doling them out.  I’d be the Enron of time, running a little Ponzi scheme to make people think there are three of me, but I forgot the most important thing about the Enron formula - kill them with my rates.  Oops.

One night last week, though, I got loose.  It didn’t start out as shopping therapy.  Mrs. Perils’ cell phone was starting to act up and, after I determined that she was eligible for an “upgrade” (wherein you voluntarily open your bank account to Verizon for two more years in exchange for a “free” phone upgrade that somehow ends up costing $200), I headed up to Northgate after work to make the deal.

While there, I decided that I should step over to Macy’s (the former Bon Marche and future Federated) to buy a new pair of jeans.  On my last couple of plane trips, I’d become a little self-conscious about sitting in the first class cabin in jeans fashionably ripped just above the knees.  “Fashionable” if one is twenty-something and the patch of thigh peeking through is an enticement rather than a harbinger of decay.  Far from therapy, this exercise reinforced my depression, as the reason the old jeans had deteriorated so was that I was fastidiously avoiding clothes shopping until I’d lost a little weight.  Instead, I’ve ballooned to 157 when I should be under 145.  Bracketed by this pincer of dueling shames, I sucked it up and found a pair of jeans I could squeeze into, and promised them I’d reward their heroic efforts in the near term by honing myself to meet and exceed their engineering specs as spring approaches.

I don’t get out shopping much, but once I get loose in a mall, a bender might be in the offing.  And there’s nothing to throw gasoline on this fire better than the proximity of a Best Buy store.  The distinctive yellow sign beckoned me like a shimmering lemon jello shooter, and I was in the door.  I had a couple of vague notions about things I wanted, and headed in the direction of the computer department.  When I came to in the checkout line, I realized I had just signed a credit card slip for:

• 2004 Turbo Tax for Business
  
• 2004 Turbo Tax for Individuals
  
• 100 burnable cds
  
• a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 PS for may laptop, whose onboard sound card has had a persistent stutter which dissuades me from watching movies, playing sound files or streaming KEXP when I’m out of town
  
• a sweet little number keypad I can plug into my laptop, the one item, out of all the others, I’ll write about later

I guess there’s nothing HORRIBLY frivolous in that list, but one wonders, as one does after too many vodkas and the room is spinning, whether that fact (no harm done) is just a happy accident.  Could there just as easily have been a plasma TV on the list? 

Visiting my mother this weekend in Toledo, off to Milwaukee next week to tend to the care and feeding of auditors from Grant Thornton.  Back in the blogging game, though - watch this space.

Oh, Wall, full often hast thou heard my moans
For parting my fair Pyramus and me!
My cherry lips have often kiss’d thy stones,
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee.
- the lovelorn Thisby, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Big doings around here the past week - we had our retaining wall rebuilt, arresting for now nature’s desire to pull us into Puget Sound eventually.  Around Thanksgiving, during torrential rains, a good part of the wall collapsed.  It had been leaning further and further toward the street, and I have spent the previous year or so studiously ignoring it.

My wife interviewed all the contractors and pretty much made the final decision on her own, a new exercise for her, and she did a damned good job.  Many of the bidders wanted to haul our granite rocks away and replace them, which just didn’t make a lot of sense to us.  Also, they seemed to prefer “dry stacking” instead of mortaring, a look we prefer.  She held her ground (heh), and ended up with a great deal and a nice looking end product.

It may just be contact paranoia, but my take on the celebrity deaths this week is that Hunter S. Thompson and Sandra Dee have snuck off to make a box-office juggernaut called Gidget Goes Gonzo.

I got a lot of pleasure out of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.  I think I read it sometime in the late 70s, and it was a good bit of corrective medicine for someone who, with his first-ever trip to the ballot box, voted for Nixon in ‘72 (fodder for another entry at another time - remind me).  And I laughed until I bled out of every orifice reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 

I thrilled at the idea of New Journalism - it seemed like something I could do, maybe, after dabbling briefly and unsuccessfully in trying to write fiction.  I read Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion and HST and huddled in my cocoon of optimistic procrastination (far preferable to the pessimistic procrastination of the days I thought I could write fiction).  I guess it worked out that I didn’t have to do all that crazy shit cuz HST did.

I certainly can’t write a fitting obituary for him, but check out the terrific ones here and here.  On the upside, maybe I can now get Ralph Stedman to illustrate my blog. 

Tour d’Torpor is once again playing in Milwaukee.  I’ve been pretty successful at being out of town for our anniversary, my wife’s birthday and Valentine’s Day the past few years, and I did it once again yesterday.  As usual, I’ll save one or two of my little airplane snacks for her, and everything will be cool.  Won’t it.

I worked late last night at my client’s, alone, and barely restrained myself from prowling people’s desks in search of Valentine candy stashes.  Caffeine was a problem, however, as I was locked in, and there are no Starbuck’s within strolling distance anyway.  So, I went to the lunchroom and pulled one of my more dastardly tricks:  I set up the drip coffee machine as if to make a full pot of coffee, but when the lifegiving elixir started streaming, I caught the first 5 ounces in my cup, then let the watery remainder collect in the pot.   I anticipate several requests from the night crew for a more expensive brand of coffee over the next few days.

My client in Tucson is a business that started as a sole proprietorship and grew to dominate its niche in Tucson and make major inroads in the larger Phoenix market.  As is often the case, a large part of the success of the business is invested in the personality of the founder.  I’m engaged there because some venture capitalists I know purchased several businesses in the same niche and needed someone to pull all the accounting together into a single system.

I’ve wondered about the logic of the acquisition, since venture capital works best when it’s the wind that spreads a hot local fire to acres of ready tinder.  Something replicable - think Starbuck’s.  This business seems more like a free-standing oak on a savannah. 

Anyway, there is the problem of cloning The Founder in order to not only grow the business, but to merely continue its existence if he croaks or decides one weekend that he just won’t return from his place on the Sea of Cortez.  The original idea was for him to groom a young principal from one of the other acquired businesses, but he’s consistently disdained this fellow, and it’s started to look like it won’t happen.

On my arrival in Tucson this week, I found The Founder’s 30-something Son working across from me.  The Founder intimated to me that his hope was for this Son to assume the mantle that ill fit the hapless acquiree.  My immediate reaction, as I regarded them, was a pang of desire - at that moment, I wished I had the opportunity to bring my son into a business, to work with him as mentor and partner, and for the first time since meeting him I envied The Founder.

The next day, while The Founder and Son were in Phoenix, The Founder’s Brother came into the Tucson office.  The Brother has been very successful in business ventures elsewhere, and is known not to suffer fools.  In conversation with me (he hasn’t discovered yet the profundity of my foolishness, although I believe he has his suspicions), he asked if I’d met the Son.  I said I had, and he shook his head and said, “It’s not going to work.  The kid just has no personality, he’s a dud.  I mean, the kid’s had some hard times and I feel badly for (Founder), but this won’t work out.” 

I had to (silently) acknowledge that my attempts at discourse with the Son hadn’t generated any sparks, and I saw that Brother was pretty much right on the money.  I foresaw then that this would not end well for any of them, and my envy for The Founder was replaced with regret for the strife and disappointment that seemed to await him.