One of the things that you learn very very quickly when working adjacent to the law (I work in a forensic accounting office and have worked on the inside as a court recorder and internal accountant for the Commonwealth Law Courts), is that the legal profession is almost entirely populated by snakes, lions, tigers, and bears (oh my). Although it is true that some people do enter the legal profession because they genuinely want to help people, the system is so adversarial that even the most noble of intentions are soon quelled in favour of fighting for their clients at any and all costs.
To be sure, a profession which is steeped in ceremony, silliness, pomp, circumstance, tradition, class awareness, theatre, and language, is going to develop both witty and witless protagonists, who being paid many many thousands of dollarpounds are going to be gloriously aware of all of the above and will play with all of it. If Santa Claus came to Legal Town and was making his list and checking it twice, he would find that members of the legal profession would not only appear on both lists simultaneously but argue vociferously about the definitions of both 'naughty' and 'nice'.
Also as you might expect, a profession dealing with language and its implications as its stock and trade, is going to develop all kinds of its own cant, where words are made to twist on their own axes until they no longer mean what they aught to. When a member of the legal profession talk about their 'learned friends' they actually mean that they consider the person standing opposite them as both irretrievably stupid and borderline enemies in a blood feud. As for the rest of use who stare inwards like horrified observers to what is often the slowest metaphorical car crash in town, we are consistently made to feel lower than a snake's belly and smaller than a spider's spectacles.
Last week though, I was given a phone call which was a kind of congratulation; because of a line of text that I'd inserted into a report which has gone rogue.
By way of background, the case where I'd inserted this particular note into a set of accounts was particularly heated and nasty. In order to protect the names of the parties, I shall refer to this case as Thunderbolt v Lightning [2018] ("very very frightening" - R). Thunderbolt and Lightning were a married couple going through divorce proceedings and Lightning had kept a set of accounts that can be best described as fanciful. There were so utterly terrible that the Profit & Loss Statements and Balance Sheets didn't even obey the basic rules of arithmetic, much less any accounting standards. If you get a column of figures that do not add up, then it might be considered kindly as a typo. If you get multiple columns of figures that do not add up, then this looks very much like obfuscation and we have to consider that some or all of the entries are either incompetent or untrustworthy.
My note of a "Completely Unknowable Fudge Figure" which was in a Balance Sheet was to indicate to my boss that the thing didn't add up and that in order to make it fit some kind of arithmetic sense, that I had to insert numbers to make the balances balance. In other words, I had to fudge the figures.
Unless you have some kind of synesthesia, numbers themselves do not have any personality and so if you want to convey some kind of impression about the information which you have, you need to insert commentary. Most of the notes that I leave in sets of accounts and dividend spreadsheets have to do with the technical information itself such as "No Div Since Listing - Mar 1997", or "Expect Deferred Tax Ben Notice". This was different.
I thought at the time that this would be as far as the notes would go, that is that I thought that this note would only be used for internal consumption. BUT (and never start a sentence with a conjunction) my boss liked this so much that he'd kept several of mu snide asides in the final report and that instead of a complete mess, the figures were so terrible that they were an incomplete mess. For who could hate or bear a grudge against a luscious bit of fudge?
The report for Thunderbolt v Lightning [2018] was submitted with my notes intact and the term 'Completely Unknowable Fudge Figure' not only stayed in the report but was referred to throughout the case; almost as though this were symbolic of the sheer audaciousness of the shenaniganry going on within the accounts.
This may have been just another fun little entry within the annals of the Family Court of Australia but I got a phone court from a clerk of the court who specifically wanted to speak to me. Their phone call was to inform me that the term "Completely Unknowable Fudge Figure" has now appeared not once, not twice but thrice in other unconnected cases. It would appear that my incendiary aside, has exploded and has started to have minor echoes and ripples through the court.
Now work is heat and heat is work and work's a curse, and all the heat in the universe is gonna cool down 'cause that's entropy man but at least this little blob of work has warmed the hearts of a few. I rather like that not only have I set off my own little skerrick of silliness into the world but it's gone off and had a life of its own.
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