Dire Straits - Planet of New Orleans

When I was 18 years old Ted Ripoll gave me a job at Aquatic Offshore Engineering Inc. in Aberdeen, Scotland. Ted was from New Orleans and he had trained as an accountant with the FBI.


For a while he talked about sending me to work for a few months in their office in Belém, Brazil, a city on the mouth of the Amazon. I think I would have enjoyed that, but it was not to pass, ...


Instead, I spent way too much time in reception talking to Heather, and Carol. I learned a lot of stuff from Mary that I never wanted to know about how BP, Amaco, Total etc. liked their bills to be presented, and that was when I realised what a total fucking waste of time commercial accounting really was. I used to invoice tens or sometimes hundreds of thousands each month to these companies, all done by hand because their requirements for presenting bills were all so specific that I would have needed a custom-designed language to describe each of them sufficiently precisely to be able to automate the process. See my comment here: Jade Giving an Example of How A Bad Idea Can Cause a Deadly Pandemic.

This ought to be a lot more interesting than my career! 😀


See Terry Gilliam's Closet Picks.

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