whole prohibition thing came around uh and he kept getting demoted because uh uh originally he was like head bookkeeper and then he got pushed down until he was like a shipping clerk because uh business was going getting smaller andsmaller so what he had is uh one of his sons came working for him
A quick story. My mother, when I was a little kid-- I grew up in the '70s in Sacramento Valley. And she was a bookkeeper at a local travel agency. And the local travel agency was in the mall.
So my mom did fine. She was a bookkeeper and she just went and became a bookkeeper at another little business in town. But not everybody sort of has that resilience depending on the type of skills that they have.
It is nothing like that, let me tell you. You're the bookkeeper , you're the plumber, you're the electrician. When you're knee-deep in the sewers, scooping out because of the flooding in the basement.
And my parents were working class. And my mom used to be a bookkeeper . And my dad was an engineer.
He was just testing sort of my strength of character and that I wouldnít buckle under his demands and that when I started working for him I realized that there was this incredible network of women who worked for him before me and his bookkeeper who was working there at the same time as me and who went to work for him after me. And we all kinda share this very same, I guess strength, I had two older brothers and so I got bullied a lot as a kid, in a good way you know teased and pushed.
At best, it seemed to reproduce things. Clerks copied endlessly, bookkeepers added up numbers to create more numbers, and insurance men literally made more paper. For the tobacco farmer or miner, it was not work.
to join that part of business. My parents were working-class, so my mom was-- my mom used to be a bookkeeper . My dad was an engineer.
and so you didn't have a pile of money at the end of the year, you invested it in initiatives to grow, you have to go to your accountant, or your bookkeeper , or go to your CFO, or whatever, and he says, well, this is what your value was at the end of last year, and this is what your value is at the end of this year.
More importantly, the old 18th century world of businessmen who were also craftsman, white collar types who worked with their hands began to suffer a slow decline as merchants and their groups of clerks started to exploit their superior knowledge of distant markets, and industries begin to require more and more bookkeepers to maintain their ever more complicated accounts.
You take the overall occupations in the economy, and look at the underlying skills required to do them, what you find is that those jobs that involve routine information-processing tasks, like, for instance, tax preparation, but also travel agents, bookkeepers , secretaries-- those jobs have been the ones that have shrunk the most over the past decade, because automation has affected those tasks the most.