On Being a Money Man

A friend introduced me to a friend of hers last night. "This is my friend, Anthony. He's an Accountant, a financial expert, a math wizard." And I kinda shrugged my shoulders and did a sorta embarassing kind of gesture and said something like "Well, not really a numbers wizard or anything, just went to business school, and learnt all the stuff like 1+1=2, and a slightly more complexed thingy like calculus, that's all!" and it didn't matter and it doesn't matter as it relates to something stupid like getting introduced to someone, but it got me thinking -- not so much about the fact of it, because the fact, I think, is that I'm not an accountant, because I'm not practising accounting -- but about my reaction to the idea of being an accountant. Got it?

When she said it, I kind of felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Like, "no, it is not my fault, don't hate me for this, I'm not one of THEM, it was just an innocent mistake." Nothing serious, not like being called a rapist, a chainsaw murderer, or an UMNO supporter (Gawd, not too late to join DAP, i suppose!), but still, I kind of had the realisation for the first time that if I'm being brutally honest, after all the years of cheeky taunts that were much more than compliments, "geeky-boring-ol'-accountant" isn't a label I want to have attached to me.

Having that thought isn't being fair to myself. And after my conversation with Amos, my lawyer friend at lunch, I had to agree to my unwarranted self-torment. In general, both of us agreed that lawyers get a pretty bad rap too, far worse than the now seemingly more-subtle comments on accountants. We hear of surveys showing that people see "lawyer" as a pretty negative thing. All those "lawyer" jokes. A gallup poll i remembered having chanced upon in one of those magazines at Borders, places lawyers, in terms of ethics, down there right below the politicians, police personnel and building contractors and just above the insurance and real estate agents.What about funeral directors? Yikes!

I was indeed in a better position than Amos.

But post-graduate business school should have taught me much better. I know lots of terrific, ethical, good people who are now accountants, bankers and (corporate)lawyers. Doing all kinds of things, practising either at the government sector or corporations. I think most of my ex-classmates want to do good in the world, and at the same time, enjoy good social lives too, even flamboyant ones found in the Malaysian Tattler, thus definitely far from the geeky & bespectacled stereotype that has been so famously tagged to the profession.

Anyway, most professions do have their fair share of "ethical misfits". Even the respected medical profession has its "Dr. Kervokian" issue to be dealt with since it goes against the very foundation of the "Hippocratic Oath". What about those illicit under-the-counter sale of prescription drugs.

And Thank heavens for the auditors who uncovered the Enron and Madoff scams in the US. On the local front, the integrity of the local accounting firm will be tested soon via the revelation of their findings into the Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) scandal.

I don't have a next paragraph for this post. I'm kinda curious what other people think, if this makes any of you think about anything.

I'm not sure it will. ^_^