addicted to work

I do not work in a place that I would have ever considered working had not a strange coincidence of events taken place; i worked in a web consulting firm, it was 2001, i was firing people on a biweekly basis, one of my clients kept asking me if i wanted to work for them instead, i finally said yes, after an incident when my work amex card malfunctioned buying an Amtrak ticket and I was convinced I had been fired but not yet notified (living in fear of getting fired - that's for another post) and there it was, the cultural anthropologist specializing in Lithuanian cultural history was now an IT director at an accounting firm.

I don't care a whole lot about accounting as something to actually DO. The notion of accounting itself is another matter, as is the notion of consulting. Now there's two cultural histories that have been waiting for an ethnography. Mary poovey did great work on numerical representation, and leigh weiss i hear did her diss on the history of consulting, but i haven't really looked for it - anthro's ignorance of business culture - another post for that too, as it involves lengthy fuming...ok, back to the original narrative, which is accounting as an avocation. Which is something I struggle to understand. what makes someone want to be an accountant? to know and use rules all day long, rules that determine if 1) a company has been true to the letter, and MAYBE the spirit, of both law and "generally accepted accounting principles," in attesting to their financial actions over the past year, and the fiscal condition that these actions have put the company in, 2) a company can pay less tax without appearing to be taking advantage of legislative and/or bureacuratic errors and/or loopholes. somehow i doubt an accountant will ever read this and answer me.