My favorite quote on deadlines comes from Douglas Adams, theEnglish author, best known for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He apparently said:
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”
Accountants hate deadlines. They never let them go by, so never hear this lovely whooshing noise. And if deadlines do go by, accountants never let them, they watch them go by in extreme stress. Missing deadlines means failure, penalties …. And no whooshing.
Accountants don’t even set their deadlines, they leave this to others; the client, the taxman, company house, shareholders… Deadlines loom and accountants endure or suffer.
Despite this suffering, accountants invent words to make deadlines seem lively, easygoing even banal. Deadlines are never impossible they are ‘tight’. When they are too tight they ‘push them back’. They never say a deadline is looming, they approach them. Accountants ‘meet’ deadlines as though they were going for a drink with colleagues. They ‘beat’ deadlines, not as in a punch up but as a win. When there are too many deadlines, accountants juggle with them imagining a performance in the circus.
I leave you with how accountants should follow fishermen and their deadlines. [1] Fishermen bait their lines, drop them in the water and then sit back and do nothing.
[1] Deadline: a rope or cord that does not run or move; spec. (Angling) a line designed to remain in one place, Oxford English Dictionary.
