Get the Lead Out

Written by Laird Long

Steve Clairborne stretched his long arms up over his head and yawned. Another morning of tedious audit work had at last gone by the wayside. “How ‘bout lunch, guys?” the pencil-thin, red-topped young man asked. As senior accountant in charge of the audit staff, he set the pace.

“Let’s do it!” Shel Jonas yelped, slamming his pencil down onto his desk. The rotund first-year staff assistant liked his food.

Tro Nguyen and Steve laughed. Anything to break the tension of the grueling ten-hour workdays that were the norm for public accounting staffs at their clients’ businesses during the fiscal year-end ‘busy season’. Cynthia Kirwan, a born accountant in both appearance and attitude, didn’t share in the laughter.

Tro carefully placed the gold-trimmed mechanical pencil his parents had given him as a university graduation present down on his desk. “You can lock up the room, can’t you, Steve?” he asked.

“Don’t sweat it, Tro,” Steve replied. “I got a key from Benjamin a couple of hours ago, so you won’t have to take your pencil out to lunch with you.”

“Yeah, but I’ve kind of had my eye on that expensive writing instrument,” Shel winked.

“I doubt it,” Tro retorted, smiling at his colleague.

The size-large auditor laughed. Clumsy and heavy-handed, he was still an ace when it came to his accounting and auditing work. “Yeah,” he admitted, “those mechanical jobbies are way too delicate for me – I keep breaking the lead. Just give me a fistful of #4’s and a good sharpener and a big eraser and I’m ready to tick and bop the books ‘til the end of busy season.”

“Graphite smears,” Cynthia sniffed, “and gets on my fingers; that’s why I always use my mini-computer to take notes or a ballpoint pen to make notations.”

“Fascinating,” Shel teased.

“Okay everybody,” Steve said, “let’s get out of this walk-in closet and get some lunch.”

Benjamin Trodger, the controller at the company Steve and his staff were auditing, had allowed the auditors to use the company mail/supply room as their base of operations. It was a small, narrow room, and the five desks brought in for Steve’s team had to be lined up one after the other single file-style, like a school classroom row. Tro’s desk was the one closest the door, Steve’s the furthest one back. It was a tight fit, and there wasn’t much room between and on either of the side of the desks. But at least the auditors had ready access to the company accounting staff housed in the one-storey office building.

“Is Dan still grilling Benjamin about those over 90 days receivables?” Steve asked, after everyone had arisen and moved towards the door.

“Or vise versa,” Tro cracked from the doorway.

Dan Skinner, a wry, wiry guy with unkempt brown hair, was the other student on the staff working under Steve’s direction. He’d been given the assignment of examining the client company’s revenue and accounts receivable systems and reported results for the year.

As company controller, Benjamin Trodger bore the brunt of the questioning from the auditors. But the sour, middle-aged man liked to give as good as he got, constantly asking his inquisitors: What’s the point of that question? Why do you need that, anyway? When are you going to finish the audit and leave?

Steve followed Tro, Shel and Cynthia out the door. Then Tro peeked his head back into the room, looking at his mechanical pencil lying on his desk.

Steve moved the young man aside and locked the door. “See,” he said, holding up the key, “all secure.”

They walked along the outer edge of the cubicle farm that was home to most of the company’s accounting staff and found Dan flipping through a delinquent accounts ledger he’d propped up on top of a filing cabinet. “Lunch?” he said, looking hopefully at the group.

“Lunch!” Shel responded, slapping the guy on the back.

“What happened to your Q&A session with Benjamin?” Steve asked.

Dan grunted. “Mr. Seldon happened. He called Benjamin into his office for a ‘lunch conference’ just as I was getting going with the guy. Benjamin grabbed up a brown bag and ran out of his own office so fast I almost got a windburn.”

Mr. Seldon was the company president. He ran the steelmaking operation with an iron fist.

Dan made a quick note on a piece of green 7-column paper, and the lead in his mechanical pencil snapped. “Cheap piece of junk,” he growled, pumping the end of the pencil with his thumb to get some more lead out the tip.

But the lead jammed inside of the pencil, rendering it useless until it could be disassembled and fixed. “Let’s go,” Dan said, shrugging. He folded the paper and stuck it in his pants pocket, then clipped the pencil to his shirt pocket.

The auditors walked down an office-lined hallway towards the rear doors of the building which opened out onto the company parking lot. They all caught a brief glimpse of Benjamin Trodger inside Mr. Seldon’s office. The controller was perched on a chair next to the company president’s desk, a cheese sandwich and apple laid out in front of him. It sounded like Mr. Seldon was giving the accounting man a rather rough interpretation of what he saw in the company’s most recent monthly revenue and expense report.

The controller cast a sour glance at the auditors as they trooped by.

Shel inhaled a medium meat lover’s pizza for lunch, while Tro, Steve and Dan downed cheeseburgers. Cynthia picked over a mandarin orange salad, which she’d almost insisted on showing the cook at the local restaurant how to prepare. With their stomachs topped up and their sixty minutes of budgeted lunch time over, the auditors headed back to their client’s building down the street.

They walked past the president’s office again and saw that Benjamin was still in conference with Mr. Seldon. The controller was perched in exactly the same position as before, the only change being that his sandwich and apple were now gone.

“They’ve been at it for over an hour non-stop,” Mary Thomason, Mr. Seldon’s secretary, whispered to Steve, shaking her head.

“Here, you open up the audit room, Dan,” Steve said, once they were back on the outskirts of the accounting cubicle farm out front. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.” He tossed the key to the young man at the head of the column of auditors.

Dan caught the key and briskly strode on to the audit room door, opened it up and entered the narrow, cramped room, followed shortly thereafter by Tro, Cynthia and Shel.

“My pencil’s gone!” Tro cried, loud enough for Steve to hear just as he was rounding a corner for the bathroom.

He ran back to the audit room, closing the door behind him so that the client staff didn’t hear any more. “You sure?” he asked Tro.

“Yes! It was lying right on my desk at the front when we left. You saw it. Now it’s gone!”

“Someone must’ve swiped it while we were out to lunch,” Shel said. “You sure you have the only key to this room, Steve?”

Steve ruefully rubbed his chin. “I said I had a key. Not the only one. Benjamin has another.”

Tro’s eyebrows shot up. “You think-”

“Yes, I think I know exactly who took your mechanical pencil,” Steve responded.