Rachael McKelvey

• Why aren’t accountants happy being accountants?
• More viruses on the horizon
• Tim Harford’s museum of dreams
• Space junks exponential growth
• Why adulting sucks more as an independent women

Why aren’t accountants happy being accountants?
Despite not being part qualified anymore, I still get PQ magazine because actually I find it more useful for CPD than most networking options my actual professional body offers and the August front page asks the questions why aren’t accountants happy being accountants? TLDR; it just sucks, but cloud platform Dext have surveyed accountants and bookkeepers in the UK about their current feelings for their profession and what they would need to be happier…It makes for slightly depressing reading, but also for me makes me realise I am not alone.

I frequently get asked how I ended up where I am, recent direct quotes include “How on earth did you end up in finance?!” and “you’re too nice for that to be your job” but as the Dext research showed, I am in the third who are considering leaving the profession in the next 5 years and in the 21% of those who want to leave for a completely different career and I think I echo on the lack of healthy work life balance and spending too much time completing manual tasks. Typically, I find most organisations are reluctant to invest in their finance systems and processes but then I look around at my peers (the ones who do belong in finance and who aren’t to nice for their jobs) and I sort of think its just us standing in our own way, empire building, wrongly pretending we’re better than people who don’t get numbers and that we always know best.

While I do enjoy nothing more than getting my head down and reconciling something to the penny, I still fundamentally deep down think is the best part of my job is supporting colleagues to create and deliver a product or service they always dreamed of, which is rarely actually about the numbers, it’s exploring the idea and their current offering on to see what we can piggy back on the back of for minimal investment, it’s a great way to really test their passion for it and to see if the idea is viable, so does month end set my soul alight when I’m still working at 7pm knowing that when I get home I have to set up a back up running overnight so I don’t loose 2 hours I don’t have tomorrow? No, but is it a means to an end? In the right organisation absolutely, in the wrong ones I’ve quit for a lot less.

More viruses on the horizon
Umm it’s been a week for viruses and considering I am not a virologist nor is it 2020, it feels unfair that only I know about these things and as sharing is caring her is this week’s round up of all things that might kills us. Both UN and WHO have warned of an “alarming rise” in the increased risk of outbreak of bird flu in humans and while the current common strain of H5N1 was not passed between people, there have been 8 cases in humans since December 2021 so really is a case of when not if. There is currently an outbreak of feline coronavirus in Cyprus that is spreading fast with an animal rights group claiming 300,000 cats have died on the island this year so if the virus does come home with someone from their holidays we could all be in for a treat. Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever is also currently taking human life in Iraq, Pakistan and Namibia and is currently working its way across Europe by all diseases favourite transport mechanism, the humble tick.

Why does all this matter? Given the UK is finally reflecting on the impact of the Covid Pandemic and challenging our preparedness or not, it was definitely not, the true cost of surviving the pandemic are yet to be known so how can be learn for the next possible health crisis? The IMF said this week that the “Scars from the pandemic, including to students’ learning and [skill training], could weigh on economies for years to come,”  

Tim Harford’s Museum of Dreams
It’s fair to say if I was to have my time again I’d probably take more of an economics and social sciences slant on the journey I took to get where I am, so seeing that Tim Harfords Undercover Economist column this weekend (https://www.ft.com/content/2abde970-1520-499e-b63e-45479d812b2f) was about what he would put in his Museum of Economy, I knew I had to read it the tag line reads “Museums often document economics in abstract. It doesn’t have to be that way” and as it turns out he is not wrong.

I often find myself having conversations with very successful people who with some level of unwarranted shame confess an economics related sin, usually along the lines of “I do not understand [insert some concept that impacts all our lives but that we do not talk about]

and it makes me a little sad. Harfords article about his desire for an exhibition all about money and the economy makes some valid points about how we dedicate time and learning to science and technology and natural history but rarely consider the economics, possibly because economic things are hard to put in glass cases, but they aren’t hard to make interactive get stuck in displays around, exactly like a giant hamster wheel that illustrates the grinding repetitiveness of a gig economy job as at KA-CHING! – Show me the money exhibition in the Danish National Museum.

Space junks exponential growth

Apparently SpaceX’s Starlink has been forced to perform more than 25,000 course alterations in the last six months to avoid colliding with space junk, or to give it its correct title “orbital debris” which seems mad, madder still that his is apparently double the amount of course corrections Starlink had to make in the proceeding period. Exponential growth in action, Hugh Lewis, professor of astronautics at the University of Southampton and leading expert on the impact of megaconstellations on orbital safety, said “It’s been doubling every six months, and the problem with exponential trends is that they get to very large numbers very quickly”. The numbers in the article are wonderful and Lewis estimates that by 2028 Starlink will have to make 1 million manoeuvres to avoid hitting space junk.

The European Space Agency currently tracks a fair amount of space junk, with 34,000 bits of junk on its radar over 10cm in size and while actual space junk collisions are low, with an increased desire to have more satellites out in space, SpaceX wanting to increase their numbers from 4000 to 30,000 in the coming years, this all feeds into a growing fear of the Kessler Syndrome that if there is too much junk out in space, then it could result in a chain reaction where more and more objects collide thus creating more space junk that eventually there might be so much space junk it might be possible to move and the universe will do its own course corrections.

Why adulting sucks more as an independent women
Nothing quite like a small home emergency to make me rage, the kind of rage only a women knows, the one that feels like bees in your stomach that might just swarm out of your mouth. A simple leak from an upstairs toilet, that has obviously been slow leaking for some time, that odd slight stain on the kitchen wall that I’d been meaning to investigate but hadn’t because honestly it didn’t look that bad and it could have been a whip of a dirty dogs tail. Well that turned into water leaking through my kitchen ceiling, that was coming from the toilet upstairs.

The plumbing in my house is atrocious, like you can see why they did it, but you wouldn’t do it because it doesn’t make any sense, the easy thing to do, not the right thing to do. Shoutout to my amazing local friends who alerted me to it and the man in my life who gave up his Monday to wait for a plumber who failed to turn up and ignored follow up call. My employer are wonderful and I worked from home on Tuesday to be in for said plumber to return because everyone deserves a second chance…I explained the two parts of the job, returning the toilet to functioning and then redesign the layout to take out what is causing recurring infuriating issues, so imagine my delight after putting up with the usual level of being patronised you just expect as a women with a tradesman for him to say “I’ll give you a day to discuss the cost with your husband”, the cost you haven’t told me because you don’t trust that I understand and the husband that I don’t have because men like you make me think getting married is literally the ickiest thing I could do as a women.

Just for the avoidance of doubt I would rather have an unusable toilet and a continued leak than give the money I have to work twice as hard to hard half as much as man, to a man who asks if I have to check with my husband about how much it’s going to cost. Currently considering just fixing it myself, like I’ve done previously, because interacting with tradesMEN gives me the actual ick.

Current watch: The Flight Attendant – Based on a book of the same name I accidentally inhaled the 2^nd season of this this week in the name of self care. The plot is low level bonkers, but there are people like Cassie Bowden who live and walk amongst us whose lives you can’t make up, it’s a wonderfully dark comedy drama mystery thriller that does light and shade so well, it’s so dark but so full of bright shining light it and hope. While battling addiction as a result of childhood trauma, Cassies character is loveable and troubled that you just find yourself rooting for, the whole way. The second series picks up off the back of the first series but doesn’t require you to have watched the first at all, which I also quite like, the twists are satisfying and the writing is impeccable. If you’ve ever had any brush with addiction, you might see yourself or others throughout this show.

Current read:
Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire by Kojo Koram – This is the book they should teach in history, it offers accessible and informative insight into the way the legacy of empire is the capitalist system we live in today, how systematic empirical values still echo loudly in all our central institutions. The mix of personal stories from Koram’s time in Ghana tying together history to the present gently walking the reader from imperial rule, to post-colonial corporate exploitation on a global scale. Certainly in parts makes for some uncomfortable but essential reading.

Most Impactful Listen: The News Meeting: El Niño, mortgage costs, and missing migrant boats – Tortoise is all about slow news and each week they seek to focus on more of the human stories in a hopes of offering a longer lasting understanding of what is going on in world around us. Each week the News Meeting podcasts sees three Tortoise journalist pitch a story on what they think should leads the news, then they discuss the running order they would use to share these stories. In this episode, they step away from the two big stories that dominated the news this week and focus on the impact of missing migrant boats in the Atlantic, rising mortgage rates and the impact of El Niño on the US. With Basia Cummings in the editors chair with Cat Neilan, Claudia Williams and Stephen Armstrong, this was an insightful discussion about why these things matter.