On the road

Where did I miss the boat? I was visiting a friend a couple weeks ago and inquired about how her daughter’s summer job was going.

It wasn’t. She had gone to register for graduate school, met a professor and he invited her to join him and some other students in a trip to New Zealand. Just like that. The only thing any school official ever said to me at registration was, “You’re in the wrong line.”

And, pray tell, what were they going to do in New Zealand? Research? A social project? What? They didn’t know. The prof was allocated the funding and said they’d figure something out when they got there. Beautiful.

Last week, I was at dinner with some friends. A couple told us that their daughter had been sent to the south of France for a year as part of her studies. From the account, it was safe to assume it wasn’t France, Idaho. Where were these junkets when I was in school?

It’s not that I didn’t get to travel. I did, as part of my co-op job. But, that didn’t take me anywhere near Europe or the Pacific.

In undergraduate school, I was an accounting major, at least for the most part. Yeah, I know. Long story and for another time.

My co-op job was with a large CPA firm. There, co-ops had a little more status than the Harijans (untouchables) in India. My first assignment was doing the grunt work on an audit of a rural bank deep in the bowels of Kentucky.

The audit manager evidently wasn’t high on the food chain to draw this assignment, much less the co-op. He was sullen during the drive south and gave me the bare minimum of a briefing. So, I didn’t expect the staff of the bank to let out a collective groan and meet me with hostile stares when we walked in. It was an unannounced audit, which was also news to me. They reached for phones to tell their families they’d be home late and then set about the task of digging up records and making my life miserable for a few days. I can’t say that the motel and local food compensated.

Another glamour job was a liquid chemical company in West Virginia. I was selected to be point person on inventory audit. The Salad Oil Scandal was still fresh in the minds of accountants, so my duties involved getting very intimate with the storage tanks. I’ll understand if that biggie eludes your memory.

The short version is that a company in New Jersey (of course) took out loans collateralized by inventory, with the due diligence being the checking of incoming ships. In reality, only the top layer of the cargo was oil, which floated on top of the heavier liquid (water) that comprised most of the shipment. It may not seem like a big deal, but about $150 million disappeared (over a billion in present day bucks).

In subsequent years with similar situations, someone on the independent audit staff would be required to do some extremely unctuous verification of inventory. In this case, that someone would be me. I’m probably better preserved than beef jerky as a result.

One other memorable assignment was in New York. Gotham. The Big Apple. The city that never sleeps. Ah, so you did draw exotic duty.

Not by a long shot. It was during a summer quarter, so the Cincinnati office was quiet. Most of the activity was between year-end audits and the tax deadline. So, I was loaned to the New York office. Many financial firms had June 30 year-ends, so they were quite busy.

I think I was given a per diem of $40. That amounted to a flea bag hotel and one hot meal a day (hot dog from a street vendor). Not that I ever saw the day.

From seven in the morning until seven at night, I was sitting on a metal chair in a vault about four floors below Wall Street. Across a small table from me was an employee of the firm. Standing between us was an armed guard. The employee would give me a thick portfolio of negotiable securities. I would count them and write the total on a paper band. He would count. If we agreed, the band went around the securities and we would both initial it. We would walk it to its shelf and pull another. This cycle would be repeated. For twelve hours a day. By hour seven, I was eying the guard’s gun.

That’s about the extent of my college-related travel. I don’t know where I missed the turn in the road, but I did.