The Flying Inn |
Home rule at home
Accounting
by David Beresford
They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes;
They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.
—G.K. Chesterton, The Secret People
I learned my views about money from my father when I was about 11 years old. My dad worked at General Electric, something or other to do with breakers or generators. Every June the union’s Social and Athletic Club worked with the management to put on a fair—the GE picnic—for the men and their families.
Isn’t it curious how appropriate that phrase is—the men. There were women who worked at GE of course—what factory could survive without them!—yet the structure of society was such that any assemblage of employees outside of the telephone industry could be described as the men. Now, the men have become the staff or the workers or some such other. There is something dehumanizing about neutered language that equates a person with his place in the hierarchy. Yet even these are far better than the ruthless exploitation implied by the insulting human resources.
The GE picnic was a wonderful event in which we could ride the Ferris wheel or bumper cars, compete in sack races, and eat hamburgers and hot dogs and drink pop. Each family was given a certain number of tickets for the food and rides, and could get more tickets for a modest fee.
One year my dad worked in the hamburger tent, a great big canvas affair held up with cedar poles and ropes. There was a long table at the front surrounded by other kids. You would have to shove your way forward and hand in your ticket, and then get to watch as the men, including my dad, flipped patties on a huge grill. Flames shot upwards with a crackling sizzle every few minutes, filling the tent with smoke and steam and the smell of singed meat. The banter of the men was more fun than the rides. The hamburger, when it came, was a massive slab of beef on a fresh bun. My sister and I would coat the meat in mustard and relish, and add a large slice of spanish onion as big as our hand, and then sit on the grass in the shade of the big chestnut trees all around the park, and listen to the shrieks and yells from the rides. Even though we were full, we always went to get another burger, just to go back under that tent to listen to the men joking with each other.
I remember one time when there were two boys in front of me trying to get hamburgers from the man at the counter. They didn’t have any tickets, nor the ten cents needed to buy a burger, as it turned out. They were clearly not part of the group; locals attracted by the crowd and trying to cadge a free lunch. When asked by the ticket man if their father worked at GE they became evasive. My dad came over from the grill with two hamburgers on paper plates, saying “Here boys, would these be ok?” and gave them to the kids.
I cannot remember all the details that followed, but my father’s line of argument was that the whole day was set up for kids, and if two poor kids wanted two hamburgers then they should be able to get them, after all, what is a union for if not to help poor people? The other argument was based largely on the rules of accounting and the rhetorical strength of the phrase “it’s not fair,” the gist being that the tally of tickets had to equal the number of patties. During my brief time at the counter I had seen several burgers flipped onto the dirt floor, so this argument seemed too flimsy to me. The upshot was that my dad was told he was not required to flip any more burgers that day, which was all to the good by my reckoning because he could now join us on the rides.
I recalled these memories recently when some children came to our door selling chocolate bars for their school, for this reason: When I was in my final year of high school, I had volunteered to be the chairman of the chocolate bar fundraising committee out of some misguided sense of duty. Part of my job was to oversee the collection of money and unsold chocolate bars from the other students. One day an undersized wisp of a grade nine girl came in crying because her dog ate a whole case of the chocolate bars and so she had neither bars nor money to hand in. The student volunteer she was reporting to kept insisting that the girl was responsible for the loss and still owed the money. I quickly realized that the only thing which stood between that little girl and happiness was a single number on a sheet of paper, a small mark less than an eight of an inch long.
Following my father’s example I promptly stroked out the number ten, yet remembering the importance of tallies to some folk I wrote in zero, which made the columns add up properly and cheered the girl up immediately. I then explained to the student volunteer that since we were collecting money for the benefit of the school which had as it sole purpose the good of its students, this was the obvious course which duty demanded.
I was sacked by the principal within the hour, and I found it very sweet to be able to follow in my father’s footsteps. 