Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 09:25:10 +0000 From: Vince Johnson Organization: Longknocker Club Subject: New guy's intro HERE'S ME, VINCE JOHNSON I'm rather retired in California. I do freelance editing and write humor, then can't figure out what to do with it after I write it. At the moment I'm editing a book via email for a guy in Germany. The book is all about philosophy and how to get out of your body (shudder) and other shallow stuff that puts you to sleep. I would rather be golfing, shooting, riding motorcycles. Sometimes I take camp cook jobs up in the mountains for horsey types. The hard part is figuring what to do during the day between breakfast and dinner when all those cowboys are out cowboyin'. Sometimes I haul out my metal detector and look for buried treasure. I sometimes write humor for local weeklies and edited a couple of them for a few years. My father used to worry about the direction my life would take. He kept asking me if I knew where I was going. After seeing my report cards he realized I was not headed for a career in Law or Medicine. "What will you do, son?" he asked me. An old trick used by fathers in his generation was to hand a boy a tool like a paintbrush or a shovel and see what he'd do with it. When I was about eight Dad handed me a hammer. "Carpentry is a fine profession," he told me. Unknown to Dad, my Uncle Ernie, who made his fortune in gold mining, had told me that gold could be found inside rocks and that gold was worth a lot of money. I saw the connection immediately. It took me all day to take that hammer and break up every rock in the back yard. I was about to start in on the foundation of the house when Dad, although commending my industry, took back the hammer. "Not carpentry," he said. Next he thought maybe my future lay in professional sports. He handed me a baseball and took me out back to size up my pitching arm. "Blaze it in there, son," he told me. We spent a couple days on that before one of my pitches bounced up and hit him on the nose. My arm had given out by then anyway. As for me, I didn't want to make a decision that would stick me in some rut for life. I wanted to be something interesting, like a lion hunter. Perhaps I would find myself in Africa. At this news, Dad bought me a Red Ryder lever action BB gun that cost $2.50. Here was something I could really get into. I quickly became a dead shot. I could ride my bike no hands and ping those BBs off stop signs like John Wayne. I even had a BB gun war with the rich Winship brothers who lived in the ritzy section on the other side of San Francisquito Creek. They had those expensive Benjamin pumps ($3.75). Didn't matter to me; I went into guerrilla warfare and the Winship boys didn't know where the next shot was coming from. I got them to settle for a Mexican standoff. "You've got to find yourself, son," Dad told me. He handed me a shovel and waited to see what I would do with that. I promptly set out to undermine the house. Encouraged by this demonstration of civil engineering, Dad hustled down to the library and got me some books on tunnel digging. Son," he prophesied, rubbing his hands, "one of these days they're going to dig a tunnel under the English Channel, and you could be just the little digger to do it." This dream failed when he assigned me the task of solving the tunnel digger's eternal problem: what to do with all the dirt you dig out? Like so many young tunnelers before me and since, I couldn't find a convenient place to put the dirt I dug up. A moment's thought presented the usual solution. I would dig another hole. This is the kind of thing that drives tunnel diggers mad. My future, Dad said, would not be in engineering. A week later, after noting my fascination with games involving numbers -- games like pool which is played with numbered balls, and poker, which is played with numbered cards -- Dad seized upon the idea that my future lay in the pure science of numbers. Numerology was very hot in those days. You could figure out anything with numbers, even the future. He rushed in the house to tell Mom that he had finally figured out which way my twig was bent. "That kid's a born bookkeeper," he told her. Over the next weeks he taught me a lot about keeping books, how those rows of figures added up in terrible, irrefutable logic to The Bottom Line, showing profit or loss. He even told me stories about the high drama of keeping books. It seems there was an embezzler who got caught with his books $310,000 short. "Where are your substantiating documents?" the police asked him. He had lost all the money at the track and couldn't come up with any substantiating documents. The cops love that old sustantiating-documents trick They nail everybody with it. The problem was I never could see the use of Dad's instructions. What I wanted to know was where he got all those figures he was teaching me to add up. "Oh, that's another story," he told me. "Now you're talking about substantiating documents, which is accounting. You don't want to know all that." I knew one thing -- I didn't want anything to do with a profession that required substantiating documents every time you turned around. If Dad had seen some of those love notes I used to write in the fifth grade and stuff in Jean West's inkwell he would have known for sure I was no bookkeeper and that my talent lay in flaming prose. Many years later, raising a family, I finally saw the reason for bookkeeping. It is used to find out where the money went. The first time I got a checking account I kept forgetting to record the checks and what they were for. I never knew how much money I had in the bank. To help keep track of the money, I devised a unique bookkeeping system. I maintained checking accounts in two banks. When one account got so messed up I didn't know what was in it, I simply let it go dormant and switched to the second account. Then after a month or so when I got a statement from the first bank I knew exactly what was in it. By then, the second account was hopelessly muddled. And that's how that went. Today, being an experienced mathematician, I know very well how embezzlers get started. First they get impatient with that annoying system of checks and balances, and devise a scheme to eliminate record-keeping. Then somehow that sloppy bookkeeping becomes The Way To Get Things Done. Eliminating paperwork is rationalized as dynamic executive action. Eventually, the day of reckoning arrives when all that dynamic executive action comes under the auditor's eye, and his yellow pencil starts punching holes in the whole mess. The first thing auditors always do is start rummaging around looking for those blasted substantiating documents. They have no imagination at all. I've seen it happen on a small scale. Years ago, when I was managing an industrial cafeteria, the district manager dropped into my office and wanted to look over the books. I was horrified to find that my petty cash was ten bucks short. I told the district manager I didn't know where it went. "Oh," he said, "that's all right. Just put in a chit for ten bucks." "What do I use for a substantiating document?" "Huh? Oh hell, just make out a receipt for a sack of potatoes, anything." That's one example of bookkeeping. Years later my first wife overdrew our checking account. I leaped at the chance to demonstrate my profound knowledge of bookkeeping. "Listen," I told her," according to my infallible system, we had plenty of money in the bank. What happened to it?" "Household expenses," she replied airily. I smiled like Perry Mason and thundered out the killer question: "Where are your substantiating documents?" When Perry asks this question the defendant's house of cards always falls apart. I sat back and waited for her to fall apart. "I don't need any documents, Mr. Accountant," she said, "so you can just take that infallible system of yours amd stick it in your ear." This sweet reason led me away from a life devoted to numbers and into the slothful life of writing, where no substantiating documents are needed or wanted. ## So that's my intro. Best regards to the group, Vince Johnson vgjohnson@neworld.net