Joe tries to do the business side of his job, trace Tony’s ridiculous spending, and runs into Bruce, a self-confessed former “blonde surfer from Canberra?” Do read on. It gets much worse.
Joe had been diligently listening to Bill explain the basics of account receipting. He was trying to get Joe to help him with identifying some of Tony’s spending. This process was rather like explaining fleas to a dog in one way. Joe had been well-intentionedly bludgeoned by Ian with the accounting side, and had become allergic to it. He wondered in passing if that was why he’d gone so far in the other direction. There aren’t a lot of trial balances in Ernst, Dali or Gauguin. Bill had picked the reaction. He decided to make a few practical observations.
“Actually, all this is a bit overrated, as a science. Somebody said years ago that you ought to be able to learn basic accounting in a few months. It’s really knowing where the money came from and where it went. Common sense, really.”
Bill was uneasily sure that this was transparent patter, and hoped it didn’t sound patronizing. Joe, however, grabbed it. He’d been fed accountancy as a sort of mystic event, not as a tool, like a paint brush. He remembered being bored to almost literal tears as a student by some of the more banal studies of painting techniques. He’d found that as bad or worse than his father’s despairing attempts to teach him the reasons for accountancy. He’d almost felt sorry for Ian, but he’d been a bit too busy feeling sorry for himself.
To Bill’s great and pleased surprise, that single bit of orientation was enough. It sometimes happens that objectivity is useful in business, beyond just being “busy being busy”. Odd, that. If an employee has some idea what they’re trying to achieve, they may actually use it as the criteria for what they do, and accidentally succeed. So it was with Joe. Given some idea of what was wanted, for once in his life, he thought, Joe set off in search of sources for some of Tony’s more exotic receipts. Phone in hand and with a fearlessness which was slightly frightening, an epic began. Bill had said, and meant, that if he could make any sense of those bits of paper he was doing well.
Joe spent days on the phone trying to get leads. He rang phone numbers on receipts, he rang retailers, a massage parlor, a hairdresser who’d received several thousand for some reason or other, an escort agency, a yacht club, a bar, and several restaurants. The hairdresser turned out to be a de facto clinic for people with money. Joe, reasoning that they were unlikely to talk about a client’s private dealings, rang and said he’d seen their ad in the phone book and wanted to know more. More, he got, in the form of someone called Bruce.
“Yais? This is Bruce?” asked Bruce, coincidentally enough. “How can we help? Comes to that, why do we help? All these things?”
Joe, wincing from Bruce’s evident desire to puncture his eardrums, waved Bill to the other phone, opened the party line, and asked,
“What are your rates?”
Bill, unwisely, was now listening on the other line.
“Ooh mine are too high, dearest? But if you mean the hairstyling, we start at $400 for a full body job? We do a nace blow…so nace…I mean, really nace…then we do the hair?”
Bruce’s hysteria at his own wit could have opened a can of sardines. Bill fell off his chair thoughtfully. He got Al on the party line, no explanations given.
“It says in the ad that you can help with pattern baldness…..”
“Well at least emotionally? We have a wide range of services that will put all your hairs right back where you found them? Really, Snookums, we do it all?”
Al put the call through to Carla, without comment.
“Sounds like a very………thorough……..deal. What about waves?” said Joe, deadpan.
“Oh, Lordy, thorough, we are? We do body hair, too? We’re broadminded? I have to be broadminded, I used to be a blonde surfer from Canberra? That’s all I know about waves? Actually, our Nigel would know more about that? Nigel?”
“’Ullo? ‘Ow can we ‘elp?…….dearest……?”
Bill, who’d hung up in desperation, was writhing around on the floor laughing. Joe silently hung up, not wanting to be recognized, and watched. Al staggered in. He’d just stopped laughing, and had an instant relapse at the sight of Bill. Carla followed, then followed suit. Joe sat, still deadpan.
When he could speak, Al commented,
“I can see them now; Nigel plucking the hairs, daintily………Piranha Woman cleaning them up with her tongue………”
“……..Mixing them with her hundred proof saliva to sterilize them………” added Carla.
“Then roaming the streets with samples and winning smiles………” said Bill, who lost it again.
“Y’know, I could have a pompadour, if I put my mind to it,” said Joe, smiling, wide eyed.
“Where?” asked Carla.
“Oh, armpits……….nostrils………ears…….keep ‘em guessing…………”
“Nasal hairs are good for eyelash replacements, too. Your eyes can have beards, if you want,” said Al, trying to help prevent Bill coming up for air any time soon.
“Some people like to get their heads reupholstered, to prevent that tacky summer lawn look,” said Carla.
“What about werewolves? Can you imagine the stigma of being a bald werewolf?” Joe was terribly socially conscious sometimes.
“Yeah, the “Show Us Your Palms” debacle. Very upsetting,” agreed Al.
They decided to pump some food into Bill, who seemed somehow to have lost weight in the course of the last few minutes. As they wandered over to the café, Al nodding to Bill, said to Joe,
“Do that on a regular basis and we’ll give you a raise.”