SPRING 2014
FMI
*
IGF JOURNAL
19
calling it quits. Time for some younger
person with a sharp wit and twisted
sense of style to take up the torch from
yours truly
and try to get the blood
boiling (…. I would sometimes have
settled for it just flowing a bit faster)
of the dedicated readers of this Journal
or maybe even our community leaders.
I will not be involved in selecting my
successor; I only ask that there be one.
Every society needs its heretics.
Anyway, I wanted to say goodbye with
a bit of a retrospective. While I would
love to regale you all again about my
$2,000 hammers, 800-pound carp and
other tales of fancy of my past columns,
I am not going to go down that memory
lane. Rather, I want to speak to you a
bit about the changes I have seen over
the past thirty years, especially those
that marked our public sector financial
community. It has been a wild ride!!!!
Forget about smart phones and the
Internet, because when I started as an
auditor-in-training, we didn’t even have
PC’s or laptops. Excel was still a glimmer
in some very smart, and now very rich,
individual’s eye. We did everything by
hand. I remember spending hours, and
in one case almost a week, balancing
a spreadsheet to the bottom right-
hand corner. Granted it had nearly
200 columns but, really a week!!!!!
We actually used to tape legal-sized
spreadsheets together to make them
wider and sometimes longer. My first
supervisor was a wizard with numbers
and he would look at my measly sheets
and say “It won’t balance.” And he was
always right! He eventually taught me
his secret which is now a totally moot
bit of black numerical magic.
Beyond the technological changes,
there were other very notable changes
– we changed! The financial community
that I managed most recently as a
CFO and continue to speak to at the
occasional fmi
*
igf event looks and acts
so very differently from the one that
I joined over thirty years ago. Heck,
I was going to be an RIA (Registered
Industrial Accountant,) wound up with
a CMA and now I just got my mind
wrapped around being a CPA. I can tell
you that my current students are proof
positive that the times they are still a
changing.
We have grown up as we left the dark
days of cash accounting behind for
the wonders of full accrual accounting
and budgeting and the marvellous
sophistication of ERP’s. We have gone
from the back office to sitting at the
highest tables of decision- making as a
Many of you will probably have noticed
by now that I have a rather deep-
rooted love of pop culture and use it
mercilessly in how I explain or express
my thoughts. I do the same when I
teach and, sometimes, my 55-year-old
brain strikes out totally when I offer up
some obscure or dated bit of trivia or
pop culture reference. The title of my
latest offering starts with just that sort
of thing – arcane to some, but there is
still method to my particular form of
madness, for you see, this is not my latest
offering to this prestigious journal….
but my last!
After thirty one years of toiling on
behalf of Her Majesty’s Canadian Public
Service, I will be retiring as of July 1st
of this year. When I signed on to this
Journal gig nearly six years ago, my
editor of the day asked me to stir the pot
and rattle the cage a bit. I hope that I was
able to do that with my little rants. I do
however have to admit that I was never
partial to really old revolutionaries, or
rock stars for that matter, continuing to
what I can only admit to thinking of as
a “young person’s game.” I mean, have
you taken a good look at Mick, Keith,
Ron and Charlie these days? But I
digress….
So, at the ripe old age of 55, I am
GOODBYE, FAREWELL AND AMEN –
“Be yours to hold it high”
