Practical notes on bookkeeping and documents. Straightforward ideas, real-world use.
New
There is a voicemail on Diane Ouellet's phone from a garage owner she has no hours to take, and in the morning she means to refuse him. Then a dairy farmer signing his quarterly file tells her about the milking machine his father refused in 1971, and she spends an evening at her kitchen table doing arithmetic on her own trade.
New
In 1962, when automatic dialing reached Matane, the town's telephone operators lost their jobs, in Romain Pelletier's words, from one day to the next. What follows is an invented last shift at that board, and the line of arithmetic that decides how many seats a trade keeps when each person can suddenly clear the work of several.
New
Céline Lavoie spent an unpaid winter becoming a third faster, and by spring her invoices had quietly handed the entire gain to her clients. Nobody made a mistake, nobody was cheated, and the month her work became the best of her career cost her $1,925. A fable about who collects the return on a bookkeeper's own investment.