Accounting For the Ultimate Shave

I had just graduated from my Master's program in December and had a few months before I could complete the application process for Ph.D. programs and begin classes. So as usual, I hit the temp agencies and went to work.

The agencies by now had realized that I was a "velcro temp," the temp that stays no matter how stupid or disagreeable the environment, supervision or task. So when the previous temp in Gillette's stationery division left during a coffee break, I was sent in the next day. The task was to reconcile a 13.9 million dollar account with a major distributor. It seems that they had gone to a "pay by receipt" system where they paid for what they actually got. Gillette continued with the standard "invoice" system, which is that they paid what Gillette told them to, regardless of what was sent. What could be the problem?

So I walk in to meet my new supervisor, Shmendrik Shlump. Mr. Shlump's office (the only enclosed one in his department) smelled of onions allowed to molder in a men's locker room. It sort of matched Mr. Shlump himself, a short, stocky man with an inappropriately 70s-porn mustache. He wore polyester dress shirts with no undershirt and the stains under his arms looked permanent. The back wall of his office was papered in management books, accounting books, manuals and reports that had that pristine gleam of the utterly unread. The desk was filled with small scraps of paper pretending to occupy sorting baskets.

Mr. Shlump starts to explain the problem, promptly gets confused, and calls in his second-in-command on the accounting floor to explain. Over six months of invoices needed to matched up, item by item with the checks sent by the distributor listing the received items. The invoices were then cleared off of the system. Of course the distributor was working with inaccurate unit prices, unit number and stock numbers. Gillette didn't seem to have any manuals or reports on how the distributor's system worked. You also couldn't clear any invoice off the system (allegedly) that had more than a $25 error.

The process was simple. Gillette had a state-of-the-art optical storage system that was going to make the entire accounting office a paperless machine. However, the system hadn't been designed for the sheer number of documents going through an accounting department. The vendor had gone out of business and was being sued for the source code. Since the optical system would go down fairly regularly right before lunch, we planned accordingly. We printed everything we possibly needed right away in the morning, often duplicating what had been printed the day before and submitted in a report which you could also print off of the system. I was to go check by check, invoice by invoice until everything had been reconciled. Of course the accounting system was a digital dinosaur that practically took punch cards. I asked Mr. Shlump if there was a manual about the clients pay-by-receipt system. There wasn't. I was definitely going to be around for a while.

The casting at Gillette was absolutely hysterical. Most of the department was female. A large proportion were middle-aged. Many were Buddhist. Most smoked like chimneys. All had dry senses of humor honed by years at Gillette. Believe it or not, they were actually not catty. The distaste for Mr. Shlump had a nice unifying influence on the department. Most of us would regularly stomp down to "The Smoke Cube," a room designated for smokers that was so smoky you didn't even need to light a cigarette.

A fairly frequent occurrence was the appearance of the animal rights activists. They hated Gillette. Gillette still tested on animals in the 90s. They put on a great show. The accounting offices overlooked the main entrance, an entrance that all employees avoided. Once or twice a week, we would line up like kids at the aquarium to watch. People dressed as ancillary Easter bunnies and Snow White's backup wildlife cleaning crew would throw buckets of red paint on each other and enact elaborate death scenes. I particularly liked the white chalk outlines they added later. They were a nice touch.

I'd go chant with the Buddhist women. One cast my birth chart for me (she was a Buddhist and an astrologist). One gave me Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand so I could have the right context for the company. I became a hit with some of the black women in the department when they realized I could neck roll with the best of them. "Where did you learn that?"

Rolling my neck I would say, "I learned it from you!"

So I make progress (now the account's only 10 million off) but it wasn't fast enough. Mr. Shlump was getting pressure from the slightly higher middle management. Daily he would ask for progress reports, usually by sitting on the corner of my desk like a compatriot--until you noticed he was continuously "readjusting" himself. "You've got to move faster!"

Except there wasn't really any way to move faster. You had to enter in the SKU numbers and payments one-by-one and check them off on another system equally as antiquated as the first one. He finally told me that I needed to start "washing" the account more by entering multiple $25 errors until the check cleared. A ten dollar check could then be reconciled with a thousand dollar invoice by entering the phantom $25 wash 38 times.

"Are you sure the auditors won't throw a fit?"

"Just do it."

Mr. Shlump also started coming by for other types of information. "What should I serve guests who eat kosher?"

"Let me guess, Mr. Shlump. Your family was Reformed."

"How did you know?"

"Lucky guess. I'll make a list."

Am I Jewish? No. But I did live in New York state for years. Which is about as relevant as saying that I stayed in a Holiday Inn Express the night before. However, you do seem to pick up the kosher laws by osmosis.

After four months, two all-night training sessions for Mr. Shlump so he could vaguely explain what was going on to both distributors and his bosses and a lot of readjustments, the account was caught up. He asked if I was interested in perhaps working on that account permanently. Scanning his office wall, I finally noticed a binder labeled "PBR system manual."

"What's that Mr. Shlump?"

"That?"

"Yeah, the binder that's labeled as the manual for the distributor's PBR system."

"Where?"

"Next to the book on unleashing your inner middle management."

"Oh, that's the manual for the distributor's PBR system."

"You mean the one I asked for the first day that I got here?"

"I didn't know we had it." It had dust on it.

"I'll think about your offer."

I called my agency five minutes later and said I had given my pound of flesh and it was time to get me out of Gillette. Through the grapevine months later I found out that the auditors were not pleased with the thousands of washes in the system and Mr. Shlump had been demoted.