Money...

Back in the way before times, before I was retired, before I was a stay at home mom whose kid didn't, before I was a massage therapist, before I was an advertising account executive, before all of that I was a bookkeeper. And one of the things I did a lot of was forensic style bookkeeping.

The Garcias (car dealership owners) kept buying out other dealerships. Bringing on new car lines. And when that would happen I would have to reconcile their books. And, not shockingly, dealerships that were bought out had not been run really well so a lot of times it was quite the task to find everything.

I was really good at it.

It was a puzzle. I like solving puzzles. Why is this charge for $250 in this space? This is not a normal amount for that vendor. Why is it here? Where should it be? Where is the matching amount? This was in the early days of computer entry. I'd have everything printed out and highlight back and forth credits and debits to find where matching entries might be hidden. Every day letting my boss know where we were. I'd give her my list of reconciling entries to review to make sure she agreed with me that what I had found was legit.

When I first went to work for the advertising agency it was as a bookkeeper. I started after Jack realized that what they were doing wasn't working. See his bookkeeper had resigned because they had gotten their CPA license and so went on to bigger and better things. BUT he was married to the woman who had been their media director before she left to have kids. Jack hired her back to do the books figuring that since her husband had been doing them she would be able to handle it. And really media is all about numbers as well so it's basically the same job.

Folks, it is not the same job. And it's not a skill you learn by osmosis by being married to a bookkeeper. Just because her husband had been a good bookkeeper did not mean she was. My first 6 months at the agency was spent unwinding everything that had gone wrong during the previous stretch. I was meeting with the CPA firm weekly going over what I had found and having them review my reconciling entries.

If I had stayed in bookkeeping I probably would have gone back to college to complete my degree and get my CPA license to specialize in forensic account.

Another thing I handled at the dealership was flooring. Flooring is paying for the cars the dealership is selling. You have a certain amount of time to pay the manufacturer for the cars. As you can imagine this is a balancing act. You don't want to pay them off too soon since most likely you haven't sold them yet, but you also have a certain amount of time to pay them off, and a smaller amount of time to pay them off once you sell the car.

It could be hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the mid 90s. I was always a little nervous about it. One week it was a million spread over three different dealerships. It made my palms sweaty to be handling that amount of money. But normally it was in the hundreds of thousands. Which is still a lot of money, but on the scale of things, not so bad.

When I was the bookkeeper for the ad agency every account and vendor ran through my hands. It was a lot of money to be handling but not as much as I had been with the car dealership. But because it was a smaller operation those dollars meant more. I was still responsible for the timing of billing and paying off bills.

Once I was the ad exec I handled the budget for the KFC co-op, Perfect Look Hair Salons and reviewed Organic Valley since our creative director was handling everything else with them, and one thing you really don't want to get creative with is the money.

During this stretch Brent was in finance at Intel working with budgets that made mine seem almost laughable. So much money to be managing and working with.

And along with us handling all of this outside money we were still handling our own finances. Pulling out the spreadsheets and budgets to figure out what summer camps we could afford to cover childcare for Katie. Much smaller amounts than either of us were dealing with on a daily basis, but much bigger percentage of our overall budget.

It's a skill to work with money like that. You have to know what you are looking at to know if it's a legit spend or not. You have to be able to back track posts and see what is actually being done. You have to understand what you are looking at. You can't just decide that an amount of money shouldn't have been spent because you don't know what it is. And you have to understand the scale of the money.

If I was working on something at the ad agency I was going to find errors down to the penny. If Brent was working on something with Intel a few hundred dollars could be considered a rounding error and written off.

Twenty thousand dollars in flooring was one car and nothing to worry about. Two thousand dollars in our home budget? Something to really pay attention to.

That's what's been so frustrating watching Elon and his Merry Band of Boys from Brazil just gut entire departments and agencies. They have no idea what they are doing. They have no clue what they are touching. They have no way of understanding what they are breaking. There is no one reviewing their work to make sure they are making the right entries.

And they don't care.

Because they aren't there to do forensic accounting and look for errors or waste. They are there to lay waste to the federal government. And to pretend otherwise is insulting.

They don't understand what they are looking at and they don't care.

They keep dropping numbers on the public, We found $50,000 dollars being wasted here! And the public thinks of what $50,000 looks like to them personally instead of what it looks like in relation to the federal budget. Scale is important.

And so is remembering that disagreeing with a program doesn't make it fraud or waste.

What they are breaking is going to take decades to fix, if it ever gets fixed. Boys whose prefrontal cortexes aren't even fully developed and wanna be super villains should not be in charge of the entire government of the United States but here we are.

It's incredibly frustrating.

Watching the world around you be dismantled while idiots cheer was not my plan for the second half of my life.