The Accounting : of Software, Professors & Buildings

Assistant Professor Ben Trotter of Texas Tech's College of Business tried to teach me accounting. A frumpy old man with thick round glasses and a striped dress shirt tucked into khakis bulging with fat at the crotch. He's your typical casting director and costume designer's accountant. So real its unreal.

Forgive me, my mind may be taking cinematic liberties. To avoid potential defamation and/or future royalty payments, I would like to make the following perfectly clear. I'm not sure how much this Re-Imagined Ben Trotter compares to The Real Ben Trotter, if he does compare at all. He may be more real, and if that's the case I expect Ben Trotter owes me some sort of something for using my fictional characterization of him in his own real life. And without my permission!

Ben Trotter had a bad leg. Clinching a rusty metal brief case in one hand, and a plastic cane in the other, he slowly clopped about on the school's cheap enamel floor. The slaps from his heavy rubber soul echoed lightly of the wall's original faux-wood paneling, peeling off at the lima bean green corners. You see, the Texas Tech College of Business somehow functioned out of an imitation 1969 banking headquarters, which the college actually commissioned intentionally, as a school, with great fanfare some 35 years before.

At 17 stories, it was the tallest building for miles. Calculations and computations were the future of business, so naturally, the college was made to resemble a giant calculator. It must have been an inspiration to attend business classes in such a modern architectural symbol, especially for a rural Texas kid. According to my father, a former rural Texas kid who I never call father and always call "dad," Texas Tech business students of the 70s wore suits and ties every day. Not shorts and flip flops. Apparently they cared about business, or at least how it feels to be in business. That's feeling business could use today.

Yes, I went to the same school my dad did. Every so often I must pause to remind myself of this very fact. It never fails to surprise. But really, I didn't go to the same school as my dad. The only thing my Alma matter has in common with my dad's is the name. Because in 2003, going to business school in a worn-out 1970s bank, lead by a diverse cast of lovably aimless assistant professors, doesn't inspire anyone into the Forbes 50... or to so much as put on a suit.

It does inspire future Deans of Business, determined to correct the administrative mistakes of their mentors. It inspired more than a few students to rethink that whole business thing to become fashion and interior designers, or writers, or architects. But most of all, it inspired scores of fashionably anachronistic accountants like Ben Trotter, clinging to some imagined "Golden Day of Accounting," long before Intuit demystified the dark art into commoditized Quickbooks software.

So the building suited Trotter. No, that's putting it too mildly. He buzzed along like a circuit inside the giant calculator building, living and breathing the building's time. I always assumed he'd been doing the same thing for 30 years, getting really good at not making tenure. He'd clap-clop step by step down to the sunken bottom of the college's most massive lecture halls, cheesily joking with students along the way to make his descent less awkward.

He became a victim of his own success, failing at research and business, making a mess of his private practice, but excelling in mass brainwashing pedagogy. Trotter transformed batch after batch of clueless 19 year old business students into clueless adding machines on legs. They were right on the money with each ledger, though they couldn't tell you why. Because when he lectured, Ben willed the accounting rules into you with his voice. Nobody had any choice but to execute them as instinct. They were "The Way Things Are."

But I couldn't be bothered by rules. Possibilities entertained me and I did little but dream delusional dreams of becoming a multimedia mogul of some exotic, rebellious sort. Accounting, and its imaginary lines between symbolic amounts didn't interest me. And they still don't, beyond what they can tell me about the scope of possibilities at my disposal. But the made up rules matter a whole helluva lot to accountants, judges, attorneys, equity holders, creditors and the government.

All this to say... I'm on day 13 in my 30-day free trial with Quickbooks for Mac, trying to get my books straight (quickly) for the start of the new accounting year. I don't remember any rules, and I don't need to. I have Quickbooks.