Background
I know that, if you’ve read some of my previous stories, it’s hard to believe but at one time the #OldManInTheWoods actually worked for a living. I (finally) graduated from Abilene Christian University in 1982 with a degree in accounting. Before this, two significant things happened to me. The first is that I married and had two boys. By the time I finally graduated, my daughter was on the way too, so it was time to get a good job. We settled back in East Texas and I found a job in accounting with the local hospital.
The other significant thing that happened before I graduated was that I was introduced to computers and found a passion. Let me tell you the story before we bring on the snake.
When you take the introduction to accounting class, you have a semester project where you keep a set of books for a fictitious company. Mine came in a cardboard box complete with journal pages, sample invoices, checks, and descriptions of journal entries needed. At the end of the semester, you turn in your project, which involves producing a Balance Sheet, Income Statement, and Cash Flow Statement.
Simple enough, but when you try adding up columns of figures and balancing each of the journals using a small hand-held calculator, nothing ever goes right the first time. My roommate and I sat up all Sunday night trying to get the stupid thing to balance so we could turn them in Monday morning. Now I’m sure some of you are wondering why we waited till Sunday to get this started. Yeah, right – teacher’s pet!
Well, Monday morning rolled around, the books were balanced and the reports were ready to turn in. I’m feeling pretty good at this point. We go to class, turn in the practice sets, and the professor says, “come with me. I want to show you something.” We go upstairs to this big office, through a door to an inner room and there is this machine about the size of an oven spitting out paper. We look more closely and it’s printing the University’s general ledger and financial statements about three lines per second. I said, “Wait, why did I sit up all night with a little calculator when this thing can do it faster than I can read?” Thus, I found a life-long passion.
Accounting and More
Fast-forward a few years, the new graduate is ready to enter the workforce. I found a job with the hospital where I was born as an accountant. I had actually had other offers with big companies, but can you really see the #OldManInTheWoods living in Houston? Things rocked along well, we were doing the books using a time-share system so we got that fast print thing going and I wasn’t having to balance everything using a handheld calculator. But… Every month we would submit our entries and get a preliminary set of financial statements about 10:30 in the morning, and every month, my boss would lock himself in his office for the rest of the day with his calculator humming. After a few months, I got up the nerve to ask his Secretary what he was doing. She said, “Oh, he’s checking the reports to make sure they balance.” I guess some folks don’t really want to change.
Meanwhile, that passion was still there and I was always trying to find ways to automate things. Mind you, I didn’t have a computer. This was 1984 and there was not a single computer in the hospital. Finally, one guy talked the hospital into letting him buy one. I’m not sure that he ever did anything with it, but I did. I worked out a deal to let me use his computer when he wasn’t using it. I learned two things on that old computer, how to write macros in Lotus 123 (predecessor to Excel) and how to program a database. So, between writing up journal entries, reconciling bank statements, and doing variance analyses, I wrote a payroll budget application.
The First Pay-off
Before this, we had a folder for each department with a list of employees, and accounting would go through each one and calculate the payroll budget for each department. I don’t know how many hours it took, but heaven forbid if someone wanted to make a change. My new application took “only” two hours to calculate and report the budget for the whole hospital. My passion was finally paying off.
Finally Doing What I Should Have Done
Soon the hospital decided that we needed to get rid of the time-share system and bring computing in-house. We were searching for a software vendor. The guy that had been in charge of the time-share system, mainly supervising keypunch operators, didn’t want to have anything to do with hardware. Well, we were right in the middle of the search and the hospital needed someone quickly, so they asked the #OldManInTheWoods to take over “Data Processing”. A mere 22 years later, I “retired” from the hospital, to join a consulting firm.
During this time, I had acquired skills in three areas that were to serve me well in my consulting career and even in retirement. Two of these I’ve already mentioned, Excel, databases or SQL (Structured Query Language – or the language of databases), and Python. Bet you thought I’d never get to the snake, huh?
Python is a general-purpose, interpreted programming language, created in the late 1980s by Guido Van Rossum. It is still being actively developed, and has numerous add-on packages that allow for string (text) manipulation, data cleansing, and allows interfaces to Excel and SQL databases. I used it to clean up data submitted by clients, then load it into a database for storage and analysis. I still use Python and Excel as you’ll learn in the story of the bean-counter gone rogue.
My plan in this series is to tell some stories about how I used (and still use) these programs. I know, many of you are already rolling your eyes if they haven’t already glazed over. If you know anything about the #OldManInTheWoods, you know that all my programs don’t always work as planned, or there’s a story behind how I got there. Hopefully, we can keep it light and entertaining.