Another whirlwind day with the Publisher’s accounting and I’m having serious second and third thoughts about that. The way it is set up, things are almost as if somebody went out of their way to make it as difficult and complicated as possible. Every step has to be handled five and six times and it is often necessary to go back and change things. This type of system cannot be improved without major changes and I don’t think the owner is keen on doing that.
Literally, each account requires 15 discreet steps and he wants them done in order for each account. Why? Because that is the way he understands it, but having him understand it was never part of the deal, although he says it was. Efficiency, however, says the work should not be linear. All the first steps should be complete before beginning the second step. It cost me half a day doing it the other way. Already I’ve had to go back and redo accounts when I discover it was a co-author arrangement with a surname later in the alphabet.
Crane emailed back, and sure enough, they want me for jury duty. They have probably heard every excuse in the book, but I will decline by not answering. I have a witness that I only check my mail once every five years and do not accept unsolicited mail from any party. I will calculate the cost of the fine and just pay it. There is also a form they want filled out which I have not seen, but no doubt it is one of those forms designed just to make sure you are who and where you say. I long for an America when one was allowed to stand still and not be molested by the system. Sigh.
So I went over to Oakwood Plaza to see the movie Borat. It will knock you half out laughing. A great twist on the theme of different cultures clashing with American. It concerns a man who comes from central Asia to learn about America and the incredible scenarios he encounters. It got me laughing out of control for the first time in years.
Back home, I spent yet another two hours on the accounting. There is little chance I will continue to do these books his way. If I cannot be allowed to make a profit, I will have to decline the work. It is mindless to do such work the way it is now arranged, by which I mean it is like a ridiculously complicated type of clerical work. I found situations where I had to go back and change my own backup copies.
There is a slim chance I would put this on a database. The motive there is partly because Don does not know enough about database to interfere the way he does with spreadsheets. He possibly thinks a database will work wonders here but I don’t think he understands the awesome learning curve if he wants to understand even to a limited degree. We’ll start with tomorrow, where he will have to destroy several checks he has already written.
I should record the cause, in case he denies responsibility. Okay, he chided me for creating a list that standardized the spelling of the author’s names and book titles. As I stepped through this list, he would instruct me to ignore certain items. Authors that died, went insolvent or became inactive. I wanted to wait until all the accounts were checked but he wanted to cut checks for the active accounts as quickly as possible. We cut checks.
Now, I find several inactive accounts that had balances in arrears. He has cut checks for people who owe him money, not the other way around. There are two choices. Devise some special scheme for the authors where the overpayment applies (a brand of nonsense) or void the checks and start over for, in some cases, the seventh time. Tomorrow we find out which he chooses.
The new issue of Cahoots is out. I took an extra coffee break downtown and went over the articles looking for patterns. While it is hard to take much of it seriously, it is based on fact. For example, I thought the article of a rich lady getting snagged for rigging a contest was bogus, but Fred knows her and she was really arrested for it. So, that means the humor is a nice mesh for my style. Here is a picture of JZ at the Halloween stand.
