Every time my brother-in-law drove me home, I would black out and wake up sore. My husband just laughed and said I was out of shape. After the fourth trip, I hid a voice recorder in my purse — and that night I heard a phone call that made me realize the blackouts had never been accidents.

Birgit’s office is handling it, don’t worry about it.

Four seconds. Four seconds. Four seconds.

And every single time I said all right, and put it on the pile, and went and did something else.

Sixteen years in this profession.

I have put about four hundred people through a variance explanation. I have asked a managing director, in front of his own board, to walk me through four line items until he could not.

I made a man cry in a conference room in 2019 over about eleven thousand dollars that turned out, in the end, to be a coding error. I apologised to him properly and I would do it again.

I would not have accepted it’s an admin step from a client.

Not from a junior. Not from a partner. Not from a bookkeeper at a two-van haulage firm in Lindell with forty thousand dollars going through it a year.