Preamble
A poem entitled “The accountant in his bath” by the English poet, novelist and playwright, Adrian Mitchell (1932–2008), was published in the January 19, 1957 issue of The New Yorker (Mitchell, 1957). The poem was reproduced in the accounting literature in a paper by Murphy (1997), who reflected on using it to encourage students to think about accounting [1].
The present poem is a response to Mitchell's, composed when many more women work in the accounting profession and spreadsheets are ubiquitous. With their calculative power, spreadsheets appear to offer the prospect of controlling the numbers that are the focus of the middle four stanzas of Mitchell's poem. Yet, with their ability to link, process and re-calculate, spreadsheets simultaneously extend the reach and dynamism of those numbers – whose character and life, in the mind of his accountant, Mitchell had identified. At the end of Mitchell's poem, the accountant is pulling on his pyjamas; at the beginning of mine, the accountant is getting into her bed – between the sheets. Thus, this new poem represents both continuity and discontinuity.
In terms of style, there is no set metre to either poem, but each of Mitchell's six stanzas is a quatrain that employs a different ABAB half-rhyme scheme. As part of my four-stanza response to his work, a similar scheme is employed. Likewise, the past-present-past pattern of tenses through the poem is used.
The poem
The accountant in her bed
The accountant retired to her king-sized bed.
Spreadsheets closed, screen dark,
Her mind numbed, her body strangely tired,
At the shutdown of a long day's work.
But then the formulae intrude.
Demanding attention, they will not lie,
And whisper of glitches undiscovered,
Of damaged cells in a corrupted body.
I have to think of something else.
They mustn't steal my hard-earned sleep.
She turns over and gives herself
To the luxury of her satin sheets.
In its own good time, sleep came,
With jumbled dreams of signs and numbers,
Cut short by the phone's alarm,
At the dawn of a new day's labour.
Notes
Murphy (1997) cites as her source the collection of Mitchell's poems that was published by Jonathan Cape (Mitchell, 1964; not 1967, as given in Murphy's references).
