DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 19

The Translator

There is a particular look people get when they have been explaining themselves for too long and still do not believe anyone has heard them. I saw it often enough in my office, usually somewhere between the first nervous apology for bringing in a mess and the second attempt to make that mess sound smaller than it was. They would sit opposite me with folders, plastic bags, shoeboxes, bank statements, company documents, trust deeds, old tax returns, loan papers, handwritten notes, and the faint expression of someone who had been fed through a machine and somehow come out the other end still owing money. They were not always angry when they arrived, because anger usually came later, after the embarrassment had worn off and they realised the confusion was not entirely their fault.

The details changed, but the feeling behind them was familiar. They would tell me they had an accountant, or had once had an accountant, or had used one of the bigger firms, or one of the smaller firms, or one of the tax return shops that turned June and July into a sort of annual sausage festival. They did not always say they had been badly treated, because Australians are often too polite for that, or too embarrassed, or too worried that the failure might still turn out to be theirs. They would say things like, “I just never really understood what they were telling me,” or “I felt like I was just a number,” or “They said it was all fine, but the bank doesn’t seem to agree.”

That last sentence was always a beauty, because banks have a way of arriving late to the party and then behaving as though they own the house. A client could drift along for years being told their affairs were under control, only to walk into a lending application and discover that the numbers, the structure, the tax position and the explanation had never actually met each other socially. The bank wanted one story, the accounts told another, and the tax returns suggested a third with the quiet confidence of paperwork that had never been asked to defend itself. The client sat in the middle of it all like a man who had followed directions faithfully and ended up in a dam.

In those moments, I was not really looking at accounts. I was looking at translation failure, although I do not think I had such a neat phrase for it at the time. Somewhere along the way, the client’s life had been converted into forms, schedules, tax codes, balance sheets, depreciation entries, director loan accounts, partnership distributions, trust minutes, company statements and bank ratios, but nobody had bothered to translate it back into language the client could use. The accounting had happened, or at least something with an accountant’s letterhead had happened, but understanding had not, and that difference became harder for me to ignore the longer I worked in the profession.

That was where my mind started bouncing. I could feel it before I could explain it, the old head against the brick wall feeling, the impact arriving before the bruise had properly formed. It was not because I thought I was better than everyone else in the profession, because that would have been too easy and, frankly, too stupid. I had seen enough clever people do ordinary work and enough supposedly ordinary people show uncommon judgement to know that intelligence alone did not make anyone useful. What got to me was the gap between what people thought they were paying for and what they were actually receiving.

There was always a public story about the sausage factories. H & R Block, ITP and the like were easy targets because they looked like production lines, and in many ways they were honest enough not to pretend otherwise. They were places where people queued with group certificates, deductions, receipts, hope and fear, and came out with a lodged return and sometimes a refund large enough to buy a fridge or settle a Christmas debt. The profession liked to look down on them, as though the mere absence of fluorescent retail frontage made the rest of us somehow noble, which was a convenient view for anyone who had never looked too closely at the machines inside their own office.

I was never completely comfortable with that smugness, partly because the sausage factories were at least honest about the machinery. They advertised the machine, staffed the machine, priced the machine and ran the machine, and the client usually knew they were not entering a long conversation about the meaning of their financial life. The chairs, the signage, the seasonal staff, the advertisements promising quick refunds, and the whole tax-time performance had a kind of blunt honesty about it. It was not my preferred model of professional advice, but at least it wore its name badge in large print.

The industry checklist became the great symbol of that model. In theory, there was nothing wrong with a checklist, and properly used it could be a sensible safeguard rather than a substitute for thinking. It reminded the preparer to ask about income, deductions, dependants, private health insurance, motor vehicle expenses, work-related costs, donations, interest, dividends, rental properties, capital gains, superannuation and all the other little tax traps that sit quietly in ordinary life waiting to bite someone. A good checklist should have opened a conversation, because the mark on the page should have been the beginning of inquiry rather than the end of attention.

Too often, though, the checklist became theatre. It sat on the desk between the client and the preparer like a script both sides were expected to follow, regardless of whether either of them understood the play. A box was ticked, a question was asked, a yes or no was recorded, and everyone felt comforted by the movement of the pen. The preparer had asked, the client had answered, the file had evidence, the process had advanced, and the only things still missing were wisdom, judgement, curiosity and the faint inconvenience of actually listening.

That was the problem with checklists in the hands of people who had not yet earned the right to rely on them. They prompted responses, but they could also narrow responses, particularly when the person asking the question did not know enough to hear what had not been said. If the form asked, “Do you have any work-related motor vehicle expenses?” and the client said no, the box was ticked and the conversation moved on. A better conversation might have discovered that the client used their own ute to move tools between sites, carried equipment home for security, drove between job locations during the day, or had been told years earlier by someone at a barbecue that “you can’t claim any of that anymore.”

The form did not know the difference, and that was no criticism of the form. Paper has many limitations, not least of which is that it cannot lean forward and say, “Hang on, tell me what you actually do during the day.” The form could only wait for someone to think, and in a production environment thinking was often treated as a delay rather than the very thing being purchased. That small shift, from safeguard to speed hump, could change the whole nature of the service without anyone in the room quite noticing it had happened.

I saw the same thing with home office expenses, travel, protective clothing, training costs, rental properties and small business expenses hiding in plain sight. The client often did not know what mattered, which was why they had come in, and which was also why the questions had to be asked by someone who understood the terrain beyond the printed words. They knew they had driven places, paid for things, bought equipment, helped family, used part of the house, worked after hours, repaired a rental, sold some shares, shifted money between accounts, or done something on the advice of a mate who spoke with the confidence only the dangerously misinformed can achieve. They did not know which of those details mattered, and the checklist only found them if the person asking the questions knew how to listen past the answer.

That was where efficiency became dangerous. The form was meant to protect the client, but in a production environment it could protect the process instead, which is a very different animal wearing the same collar. It could let unqualified or barely trained staff move quickly through a return without ever slowing down long enough to understand the person in front of them. It could give the franchisee volume, the preparer confidence, the client reassurance and the file a nice clean look, while vital information sat untouched because it did not fit neatly into the next question.

I do not say that to sneer at every person who ever sat behind one of those desks. Many were trying hard, and some were decent, careful people doing the best they could inside a system that gave them speed when they needed experience, templates when they needed judgement, and supervision that was sometimes more about throughput than professional development. The fault was not always personal, although that did not make the consequences any softer for the client. Often it was structural, and structures have a habit of making ordinary people look worse than they are while still allowing the person who owns the structure to count the takings at the end of the day.

The client rarely understood that distinction, and I am not sure they should have been expected to. They sat there believing they were receiving tax advice, when sometimes they were really receiving tax processing. The difference is not small, because processing asks the question on the sheet while advice hears the hesitation before the answer. Processing records what the client says, but advice recognises that the client may not know how to say what matters. Processing wants the return completed, while advice wants the person understood well enough that the return is not just lodged, but right.

That was the part that weighed on me. A checklist could placate the unknowledgeable on either side of the desk, because the preparer could feel safe that the system had been followed and the client could feel safe that questions had been asked. The franchisee could feel safe because the return had been completed and the fee earned, which is not an unimportant consideration if the business model depends on a procession of clients moving steadily through the door. Yet no one in that small exchange may have truly known whether the right questions had been asked in the right way, or whether the answer given meant what the form assumed it meant.

My discomfort with the sausage factory model became more complicated than professional snobbery. It was not that I thought every tax return required a philosopher, a forensic investigator and a grief counsellor, although there were certainly days when all three would have been handy and one of them could have brought biscuits. Plenty of returns were simple enough, and sometimes simple really does mean simple. The danger was in assuming simplicity before the client had been properly heard, because the easiest return in the pile can still have one quiet fact sitting underneath it like a nail in a tyre.

Once I saw that danger there, I began seeing versions of it everywhere. The same mentality existed in firms that would never dream of comparing themselves to H & R Block or ITP, and might have been quietly offended by the suggestion while running their own files through a more expensive grinder. They had their own checklists, their own workflows, their own budgeted hours, their own junior staff, their own review notes and their own little ceremonies of professional reassurance. They did not call it a sausage factory, of course, because they called it efficiency, leverage, systems, process, profitability and scalability, all of which sound much better when printed in a strategic plan.

What troubled me more was how much of the supposedly superior end of the profession had learned to operate in that way while insisting it was different. The process might look more professional, the letterhead might be heavier, the meeting room might have a glass wall and a view of a pot plant struggling bravely in filtered light, but the client could still be moved through a system built more for completion than understanding. In the larger firms, the client could be passed from partner to manager to senior to intermediate to junior to someone who was still trying to remember where the stapler lived. In the smaller firms, the same failure could be wrapped in the friendly intimacy of first names, local knowledge and a conversation about the football before the client walked away still not understanding the structure that held their business or the tax risk sitting quietly beside it.

The difficulty was that the client did not live in a strategic plan. The client lived in the consequences, and consequences have very little interest in whether a firm’s workflow looked impressive on a whiteboard. They lived with the tax debt, the missed deduction, the wrongly claimed expense, the unasked question, the misunderstood structure, the bank request that exposed the weakness, or the family mess that had been sitting behind the numbers for years. That was why I could never accept the idea that business was just a money-making exercise, because if the service being sold relied on the client not knowing enough to judge its quality, then the responsibility became greater, not less.

That was the wall I kept seeing, and the one I kept trying to point out. The checklist was not the enemy, the machine was not always the enemy, and even efficiency was not the enemy, despite my occasional urge to put the word in a headlock. The enemy was the moment the tool replaced the thinking, the form replaced the conversation, and the fee replaced the duty. Once that happened, the client could walk out satisfied, the preparer could close the file, the franchisee could count the day’s takings, and the wall could remain exactly where it was, waiting patiently for impact.

That was the thing I could not leave alone when I was building my own sense of professional practice. Service was not a handshake, a Christmas card and a tax return lodged before the deadline, although all three could be made to look reassuring enough if the office lighting was kind. Service was whether the client understood enough to make the next decision without walking blindfolded into traffic. It was whether the accounts explained the business rather than merely recorded its remains. It was whether the accountant had the courage to say, “This looks tidy on paper, but in the real world it is starting to wobble.”

In those early stages, I began to see how uneven the whole thing was. Two clients could earn the same income, run similar businesses, carry similar debt and face similar tax obligations, yet the quality of advice behind them could be worlds apart. One had been guided, challenged, warned and protected, while the other had been processed and reassured and sent back into the same weather with slightly neater paperwork. Both had paid fees, both had signatures on returns, and both probably thought they had an accountant, but only one had someone reading the room as well as the ledger.

That offended something in me that was not purely professional. It offended the part of my mind that wanted systems to mean something, and the part of my heart that could not accept “just enough” when the consequences belonged to someone else. There is an old defensive line in professional practice, usually delivered with a weary shrug, that says, “It’s not me in the witness box.” I understood the legal truth of it, but I also understood the cowardice that could hide behind it, especially when the line was used to justify doing no more than the minimum that could later be defended.

No, it might not be me in the witness box if a client’s structure collapsed, or a tax position failed, or a bank called in a loan, or a family partnership turned into a family war with a balance sheet attached. But my work might be there, and so might my advice, or worse, my silence. My explanation, my failure to explain, my decision to let the client nod through something they did not understand, might be sitting in that room long after I had told myself I was only doing what had been asked. That thought had a way of staying with me, because comfort built on distance is still comfort, but it is not always honour.

That was never good enough for me, and I say that with some caution because I do not want to dress myself up as a martyr with a calculator. I could be impatient, blunt, sarcastic and unfair in the private court of my own head. I could look at a set of accounts and see the ending three chapters before the client had finished explaining the first one, then become quietly irritated that I was expected to pretend the plot twist was still a mystery. That is not saintliness; it is a fast mind with poor traffic control and a habit of arriving early to trouble.

The trick, if there was one, was not seeing the issue. The trick was finding a way to say it without making the client feel stupid, attacked or ashamed, because an answer that humiliates the listener usually fails even when it is technically correct. A tax problem might involve Division 7A, GST timing, capital gains, trading stock, trust distributions, director loans, wages, superannuation, record keeping and a bank covenant, but the client did not need the full legal parade marching across the desk at once. They needed to know where the danger was, what had caused it, what could be done now, and what decision had to change next time.

That is where dumbing it down became both skill and wound. I had to take the full map in my head and hand over only the roads needed for the journey. I had to cut off the branches, strip out the cleverness, slow the explanation, soften the warning and translate the conclusion into language that could be heard. I was not reducing the client when I did that, although it could look that way to anyone who misunderstood the process. I was reducing myself, or at least reducing the amount of myself allowed into the room.

The phrase that would eventually, many years later, sit at the heart of Banks Consultancy was simple enough: we will speak in your language. It sounds obvious now, almost embarrassingly so, like a slogan that should come with a photo of a smiling couple looking at a laptop. But to me it was not marketing, and it was certainly not a decorative line to be printed on something glossy and forgotten. It was a complete testament to dumbing it down in its purest and most useful sense. It meant the translation was not an optional extra, because the translation was the job.

The four pillars that would later give shape to Banks Consultancy came from that same irritation and that same sense of responsibility. Advice before compliance, relationships before transactions, courage before convenience, and stewardship before extraction were not invented in a branding workshop with butcher’s paper and someone called a facilitator. They were not polished ambitions designed to make me sound more noble than I was. They came from sitting across from people who had been complied at, transacted with, conveniently handled and financially extracted from, while still not really knowing what was going on.

Advice before compliance mattered because compliance by itself could become a hiding place. A return could be lodged, an activity statement prepared, a company statement filed, a trust minute signed, and everyone could feel the comfort of boxes ticked. But compliance did not ask whether the structure still suited the client, whether the business was making money, whether the bank would understand the accounts, whether the family arrangements were about to create a future dispute, or whether the tax saving being chased today would become the problem that bit them next year. Advice asked those questions, and asking them was not always efficient, pleasant or profitable in the first hour.

Relationships before transactions mattered because people rarely arrived with clean, isolated problems. A set of accounts could contain a marriage, a second marriage, a child in the business, a sibling who did too much, a sibling who did too little, a parent who still thought control was a form of love, and a bank manager who believed security was a moral virtue. Partnerships were not just legal structures, companies were not just ASIC records, and trusts were not just deeds in a folder. They were human arrangements pretending to be technical ones, and the human part was usually where the real risk lived.

Courage before convenience mattered because the convenient answer was often the answer the client wanted to hear. It was easier to say the tax would be handled, the structure was fine, the bank would probably come around, the records were good enough, and the drawings could be sorted later. It was much harder to say, “You are spending profits you haven’t earned,” or “Your company is funding your lifestyle,” or “This trust is being treated like a family bucket with no bottom.” It was harder still to say, “The bank is not being difficult; the numbers really do look ordinary,” because no one enjoys paying a professional to remove the comfortable story they walked in with.

Stewardship before extraction mattered because a business should not simply be a machine for taking fees. That view may sound quaint, especially in a world where every second consultant wants recurring revenue, scalable offerings and a funnel wide enough to swallow a suburb. I understood the need to make money, because I had bills, staff, overheads, tax obligations, family responsibilities and the usual Australian habit of pretending cash flow is a character test. But making money from clients and taking care of clients were not meant to be enemies, and once they became enemies the practice had already begun to rot from the inside.

The trouble was that doing it properly took time, and time is where the lovely language of service often goes to die. It was quicker to prepare the accounts than to explain them, quicker to lodge the return than to talk about the business, and quicker to give the answer than to teach the client how to understand the question. It was quicker to be technically correct and emotionally absent, which is a dangerous combination because the file can look beautiful while the human being attached to it remains completely lost. A neat file can be a comforting thing, but it cannot look after a client by itself.

I found myself becoming a translator between worlds that were not naturally inclined to speak to each other. Tax law spoke in provisions, thresholds, definitions, exceptions and consequences, while banks spoke in ratios, serviceability, security, valuation and risk. Clients spoke in school fees, machinery repairs, wages, a quiet month, a bad debtor, a brother-in-law who had opinions, and the fear of disappointing everyone who thought they were doing better than they were. My job was to stand in the middle and stop each language from destroying the other, which was useful work and exhausting work in almost equal measure.

That sounds noble when written neatly, but in practice it could be a very untidy business. A client would arrive with a company, a family trust, a partnership from an earlier venture that had never been properly wound up, a rental property held in the wrong name for reasons that once made sense to someone now retired, and a bank wanting updated financials before deciding whether to renew facilities. Somewhere inside that pile would be the real issue, often not the one first mentioned. The numbers would sit there politely, like witnesses waiting to be called, and the job was to work out which one was telling the truth first.

I learned to listen for the sentence that did not fit. A client might talk for twenty minutes about tax and then mention, almost casually, that the bank had asked for something by Friday. Another might bring in a BAS problem and reveal, with the same tone one might use to mention rain, that wages had been paid late twice. Someone else might ask about buying a vehicle and, underneath that, be trying to find a way to feel successful in a business that was not returning enough to justify the hours. Accounting taught me that the first question is often just the socially acceptable doorway into the real one.

This was where the mind could be useful, but it was also where it could get me into trouble. I could see patterns quickly, and once seen, they became hard to unsee. A recurring overdraft movement, a director loan account creeping the wrong way, a trust distribution that looked clever only because nobody had followed the cash, or a partnership profit split that kept the peace today by planting resentment for later, all announced themselves to me with the subtlety of a cow in a laundry. The problem was that people did not always want the cow pointed out, especially if they had already told themselves the laundry was looking quite tidy.

Sometimes clients wanted reassurance more than analysis. They wanted the accounts to say the business was healthy because they had already told their spouse, their bank, their staff or themselves that it was. They wanted the tax answer without the life answer, which is understandable, because the tax answer usually hurts less in the first five minutes and can be blamed on legislation if things get awkward. The life answer tends to sit there staring at you after the meeting is over.

There were days when I wished I could be more transactional. It would have been easier to take the documents, do the work, issue the bill and let the client walk back into whatever weather they had brought with them. There is a certain professional peace in limited responsibility, and I could see why some people preferred it. You cannot bounce your head against every brick wall in the district and still expect to have much forehead left for family photographs.

But I could not accept the idea that clients should be left to hit a wall because explaining the wall took longer than preparing the accounts. That was the conflict that began to harden in me as the years went on. The world of accounting often rewarded production, recovery rates, fee growth, time sheets, workflow, leverage and neat files, while the client’s world rewarded survival. Somewhere between those two worlds, I had to decide what sort of accountant I could live with being, and the answer was not always the accountant that made the easiest business sense.

I do not pretend I always got that balance right. Sometimes I over-explained and watched the client’s eyes glaze over in the way people’s eyes do when they are physically present but spiritually looking for a fire exit. Sometimes I under-explained and later realised I had mistaken agreement for understanding, which is an error accountants should fear more than they do. A nod is a treacherous thing in an accounting meeting, because it can mean yes, no, please stop talking, I trust you, I am terrified, or I have just remembered I left the ute parked in a loading zone.

Learning to translate meant learning that clarity is not the same as simplification. Simplification can be patronising if it removes the truth, but clarity keeps the truth and changes the route by which it reaches the listener. It says, “Here is the tax law, but here is what it means in your business.” It says, “Here is the bank’s concern, but here is how they will read your numbers.” It says, “Here is the structure, but here is how the family actually behaves inside it.”

That last part mattered more than many accountants wanted to admit. Families did not always fit the structures designed for them, no matter how beautifully the chart looked when it was first drawn. A company might have one director on paper and three decision makers at the kitchen table, while a trust might have a trustee, an appointor, beneficiaries and a deed thick enough to stun a horse, yet the real power might belong to the parent who paid the deposit in 1987 and had not forgotten it. A partnership might be equal in the accounts and wildly unequal in effort, resentment, risk and memory, which is the sort of imbalance that rarely improves with silence.

Those human differences eventually landed in the numbers. They always did, because numbers were not the clean beginning of the story. They were where the evidence landed after people made decisions, avoided decisions, justified decisions, forgot decisions or denied decisions. A profit and loss statement could tell you what happened, but it rarely told you what people thought was happening. The work was in closing that gap, or at least making the gap visible before someone fell through it.

I remember sitting with people who were bright, capable and successful in their own fields, yet reduced to embarrassment by their own financial affairs. They could run crews, build houses, sell products, fix machinery, manage staff, raise children, care for parents, coach football teams and navigate family politics that would have made the United Nations ask for a smaller committee. But put a balance sheet in front of them and they would become apologetic, as though not understanding accounting language was a moral failure. I hated that reaction, not because I was soft, although age has made me more sympathetic than I once admitted, but because embarrassment stops people from asking the next question.

Once a client feels stupid, they start pretending. Pretending is fatal in accounting, because it hides the thing that needs to be fixed and then gives the thing time to grow teeth. So I learned to say, in one form or another, “That is my job to understand; your job is to tell me what really happened.” It was not always phrased that neatly, and there were days when my patience arrived wearing thongs and looking underfed, but the principle held. If I wanted the truth, I had to make the room safe enough for it to be spoken.

That is why “we will speak in your language” became more than a pleasant phrase. It was a discipline, and like most disciplines it was much easier to admire than to practise every day. It required me to resist the temptation to show the full machinery of thought, because showing the machinery often satisfied me more than it helped the client. It required me to translate without condescending, warn without humiliating, challenge without performing, and explain without turning the meeting into a tax seminar no one had asked to attend.

There is an injury in that, and I do not think I understood it properly at the time. When your mind moves quickly, translation can feel like walking beside someone while every part of you wants to run ahead, check the bridge, map the detour, inspect the weather and send back a report. You learn to slow down, smile, say the first step, then the next, then the one after that, while privately holding the whole route in your head and hoping nobody accuses you of being dramatic when you mention the cliff. After a while, the edited version becomes so familiar that even you can forget how much has been left unsaid.

The cliff was often real. I saw clients who did not understand that tax debt was not working capital, and businesses that confused turnover with profit, asset growth with wealth, and bank approval with financial health. I saw family entities built for tax reasons that later became family weapons, because a structure designed to save money can still injure people when the relationships inside it change. I saw people chase deductions like small children chasing bubbles, delighted by the shiny thing and unaware they were spending a dollar to save cents.

Dry humour helped, because without it the whole business could become too heavy. There are only so many times you can explain that buying something unnecessary to reduce tax is not a triumph before you start wanting to draw pictures in crayon. I would tell clients, gently enough, that the Tax Office was not a charity rewarding them for owning a ute, or that a deduction was not the same as a gift from Canberra. Most laughed, which was useful, because laughter often opened the door that embarrassment had locked.

But humour did not remove the weight. Behind every structure was consequence, and behind every consequence was a person who had trusted someone, avoided someone, misunderstood someone or been quietly failed by someone. That was the part that sat with me after the office was empty, when the professional language had gone home and only the faces remained. The profession could talk about standards, deadlines and liability, but I kept seeing the people who had come in carrying folders and walked out carrying decisions.

It is possible, I suppose, that I took too much of it personally. That has been a recurring accusation in my life, sometimes from others and often from the more prosecutorial corner of my own head. A sensible man might have built cleaner boundaries and accepted that people make choices, clients ignore advice, banks protect themselves, tax law is tax law, and an accountant cannot rescue everyone from the consequences of their own habits. All of that is true, and all of it is incomplete, which is often the most annoying category of truth.

The danger of being useful is that people come to rely on the usefulness without necessarily understanding the labour behind it. They follow the answer because the answer has worked before, and they trust the judgement because the judgement has kept them safe. They may never see the translation happening, the branches being cut off, the warning being softened, or the mental brick wall being hit on their behalf before they even knew it was there. That invisibility can make the work look easier than it is, and after a while it can make the person doing the work feel both necessary and unseen.

That is where the divide in my mind widened. On one side was the profession as it often operated, with its production lines, files, fees, deadlines, safe language and convenient distance. On the other side was the version of the work I could respect, where the client was not a number in a long chain but a human being trying to survive decisions they did not always understand. I could see why the first version made business sense, and I could see why plenty of decent people made their peace with it. I just could not make it sit comfortably in me.

This was the beginning of a conflict that would follow me for the rest of my working life. What was right and what was provided were not always the same thing, and what clients expected, what firms promised, what banks demanded, what tax law required and what people could emotionally absorb were all different languages pretending to share a dictionary. I became, for better and worse, the translator standing between them. It was not a grand title, and it certainly did not come with a cape, but it explained more of my professional life than most of the formal descriptions ever did.

By the time Banks Consultancy became more fully itself, the principles were already there, even if the name and polish arrived later. Advice before compliance, relationships before transactions, courage before convenience, and stewardship before extraction were not decorations placed on the wall to make the practice sound kinder than the machinery behind it. They were the only way I knew to stop the practice becoming another machine with a friendlier label on the front. They were also, though I did not say it this way at the time, my attempt to build a room in which my mind did not have to be reduced quite so much before it could be useful.

I can still see that prospective client in the office, another folder on the desk, another story of being unheard, another small number in a long production chain. I can still feel the old impact forming in my forehead, the brick wall waiting patiently as brick walls do. The room wanted accounts, tax returns, structures, bank reports and neat answers, because that is what the room thought accounting was. What it really needed was translation, and once I understood that, I could not unknow it.

That knowledge became both gift and burden. It gave me a way to be useful, perhaps more useful than I had ever expected to be when I first fell into accounting without properly knowing what accountants did. It also gave me another room to survive in, another place where the full force of the thought had to be edited before it could safely exist. The world of accounting liked to think it was built on numbers, but I had begun to learn that the numbers were only the language left behind after the human mess had finished speaking.