Don DeWolfe CGA

It was nearing the end of a busy tax season and a client was picking up his return.

Pointing to the highly coveted, re-useable treebag I deliver my returns in (instead of an envelope) he asked, “Do all accountants get these bags?”

It’s rare I get asked a question I haven’t heard before, but this was one.

“Why do you ask?” I queried.

“I was at a place picking up some T-shirts,” he said, “and a courier arrived with tax returns, and they were in those bags. So I wondered.”

The T-shirt company is a client, and it was coincidence he was there when their returns arrived, but for one brief moment, I was The Accountant King.

Then it was back to work.

post script – a client once told me she was carrying a load of groceries back to her condo in one of the tree-bags, when a woman came out of a store and asked if I was her accountant. “How did you know?” she asked, shocked that a stranger would know such a thing. The woman pointed to the tree-bag. She was a stranger, but not a stranger to the tree-bag.

It was winter, and after a meeting to finalize her corporate year end, a funky young client of mine was bundling up to go out in the cold.

Bulky greatcoat, long flowing scarf, fuzzy mittens, and finally, a ‘hat’.

I gave the hat a long look and commented, “Somewhere there’s a homeless man with a cold head.”

She stared at me in silence while what I said sunk in.

“Fuck off!” she snapped, her hands going protectively to her head. “You don’t like my hat?”

I was still laughing as she left.

Mel, investment advisor for one of my clients, called me. She’d just had a visit from the client and her ‘financial counselor’ – and had been asked a couple questions she couldn’t answer.

“The counselor guy wants to know if we should draw down the tax free savings account to give Sarah income?” Mel asked.

“Is he a moron?” I replied.

“He also wanted to know if she should convert her RSPs to RRIFs?” Mel continued.

“Is he a fucking moron?” I replied.

“Okay, thanks,” Mel said, and hung up.

As our meal at Swiss Chalet wound down, Noel, our waiter, appeared with finger bowls.

“Ah, lemon soup,” I said, reviving a time-worn, not so funny joke.

Noel smiled tolerantly. “Be very careful with the water. It’s really hot.”

Unable to resist, I plunged my hand into the bowl as soon as he set it in front of me. His eyes widened in horror.

“Ahhh!” I yelped, pulling my hand out, droplets of water spraying everywhere.

Noel leapt back as if it was hydrochloric acid. “Sir! I warned you!” he wailed, horror etched on his face.

He looked to Kate and Trish, hoping for validation that he’d been clear about his warning, and wasn’t to blame for any injuries. His horror turned to disbelief as he saw they were convulsed in laughter, tears running down their cheeks. Slowly he came to realize he’d been had.

“Don’t you have feelings in your fingers?” he accused. By now I was laughing too hard to answer.

He fled.

Later he presented me the bill with a flourish. “For the man with the steel fingers.”

Friday.

Christmas Eve eve.

6:00 a.m.

I’m en route my office.

First stop, the local Tim Horton’s.

I wheel into my short-cut – the loading dock driveway behind the little strip mall. There’s never any traffic along this 300 metre stretch, and it’s 1/3 the distance to the drive-through. Plus, if I hit the gas hard in second gear, I can get my wheels off the ground on some of the dips.

This morning I’m braking hard to make the turn into the drive-through entrance, when I meet another car. We get there about the same time, but the other car stops, so I zip in. I figure the other driver is being courteous – after all, it’s Christmas! They lay on their horn. Apparently I figured wrong.

I order, pull up, and check my mirror. An angry looking woman is driving the car. As she’s ordering I decide to teach her a lesson for using the horn.

I get to the dispensing window and pull out a $20 bill.

“Good morning,” I say to the woman who passes me my coffee. I hand her the twenty. “This is for me, and I’d like to pay for the order of the woman behind me.”

Coffee Girl looks momentarily puzzled. She points behind me. “Pay for her?”

“Yes.” That’ll teach her. “And, keep the change.”

Now Coffee Girl is even more puzzled. “But there will be a lot of it!”

“Merry Christmas,” I say, and hit the gas hard. There are more dips in front, but with a hot coffee in my hand, I dodge them and hustle to make my green light.

Okay, I’ll admit it – I’m a sentimental guy.

I carry around the cap badge I wore when I was an army cadet, 37 years ago.

And every Christmas, the cork from champagne given to us on our honeymoon 25 years ago finds a place on the tree.

And twice a week, I strap on the shoulder pads / chest protector I inherited from my Dad, when he stopped playing hockey.

At one time, the DeWolfe squad could fill the ice. Every Saturday morning me, my two brothers, my Dad, and my wife Kate laced up our skates and chased a puck around the rink. However, nothing lasts forever, and now it’s just Kate and me keeping the tradition alive.

Jamie was the first to go – he was only playing to get close to a girl he liked anyway. Then Al. He moved to the country and a ‘local’ game meant a grueling winter drive on dirt roads. Finally Dad gave it up. He got hit in the chest with a puck that broke a rib and punctured his lung.

Dad was wearing the ‘chest protector’ I now wear twice a week when that puck snapped his rib like a dry twig. This happened 20 years ago.

I put one plus one together…yesterday.

I prefer tea to coffee, but I have discovered the odds of getting a decent cup of tea in a restaurant are about zero. Between cheap tea bags, cream instead of milk, or water that isn’t hot enough, it’s just safer to order coffee and add lots of cream and sugar.

However, on this particular morning, as I joined 5 fellow accountants for our monthly breakfast meeting, I was feeling coffee-ed out. Plus, one of the guys had a nice china pot in front of him and a selection of premium teas. I decided to take a chance.

I gave the waitress my order and included a pot of tea, with milk.

Moments later she was back, proudly transporting a teapot. Now I knew she didn’t have time to get to the kitchen and back, and I couldn’t recall seeing any machinery in the little alcove she came out of for boiling water.

“Is that water boiling hot?” I asked.

“Oh yes, boiling hot,” she replied.

“Freshly boiled?” I pressed.

“Freshly boiled,” she confirmed.

“So if I stick my finger in there, it will scald the flesh right off the bone?” I asked. By now, conversation had stopped around the table.

“You sure will,” was the irritated answer.

I took the pot, removed the lid, and as my colleagues watched in horror, plunged my finger in – and left it there, staring the waitress in the eye.

“I shower in water hotter than this,” I told her, and passed the pot back. “No thanks.”

A couple minutes later I had a fresh pot of water that was too hot to hold, and a sometime after that, a small jug of milk.

And the waitress? She had a tip that would pay for the Globe and Mail – but not the weekend edition.

It’s evening, after a full day of tax courses at an accountant’s conference, and I’m nursing a club soda in an empty bar with 6 half-drunk accountants and a mid 20′s, semi-attractive bartender.

Sadly, this isn’t the pathetic part.

The pathetic part is watching those guys trying to pick up the bartender using…tax knowledge.

I leave when one guy, Tom, passes over a business card and says with a wink, “I can help you.”

I had to attend a funeral and was shopping for an appropriate tie to go with my black suit. Since I’m partially colour blind and have the fashion sense of a typical middle-aged accountant, I decided I better get help.

I gave my buddy Brian a call.

Brian’s a senior VP for a big commercial real estate company, always run off his feet, and a bit of a clothes horse. He took my call.

“Hey D. I’m just in a meeting. Is this important?” he asked.

“I’m buying a tie and wondered if I could go with black on black, or should I do a colour?” I said. “It’s for a funeral.”

“I gotta take this,” he told the people in the room, then stepped into the hall.

I went with a burgundy, no black on black.

I was refueling my riding mower on the dirt road by our farm when Tom, the cattle farmer across the way, pulled beside me in his battered pick-up truck.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I assured him all was well and we fell into an easy conversation.

We discussed the work he was doing with his high-hoe in the back fields; chatted about the bull he had to put down; spoke about the new hydraulic piston that was a heavy bastard to install in his hay-bine; shook our heads over the Belleville Bulls’ latest draft pick, and, mused about how he could no longer drink all Friday night without paying for it Saturday.

Then we talked about kittens.

There were 2 litters of four kittens each that we knew about, and another one we hadn’t found yet. We discussed which kittens were cuter, and which ones would be good house cats, who the father was, which guys were feisty, and which ones were stupid and on track to become coyote bait.

When we were done Tom looked a little sheepish, mumbled something about the hay not cutting itself, and drove off in a cloud of dust.

I finished cutting the grass and went looking for the last litter.

Found them! Three more kittens. Cute ones, too.