Post by Big Brother on Aug 8, 2013 17:14:45 GMT -5
Lolua and myself recently attended the retirement party for our father, retiring after 37 years of working for a hospital (and, for the last dozen or so of those years, for the charitable foundation raising money for the entire chain of hospitals). For the occasion, we wrote a parody song which we performed. Well, I say "we", but Lolua did most of the work of writing, although our mother and myself also contributed a few lines here and there. Lolua also did the initial public performance, singing the song before Dad's assembled colleauges to uproarious applause. I later joined her on encore performances whenever someone else came into the party who'd missed the first show.
The song in question is a parody of a memorable crowd-pleaser of a tune from Les Miserables, the stage musical. Here's a youtube clip with lyrics of the original song we parodied:
And here's our parody lyrics:
MASTER OF ACCOUNTS
(with apologies to Schonberg and Kretzmer)
Parody lyrics by Lolua, Big Brother, and Mother Superior
Welcome, good sir
Sit yourself down
And meet the best
Bean-counter in town
As for the rest
All of them crooks
Filching the Gifts
And Cooking the Books
Seldom do you see
Honest men like he
A gent of good intent
Who's content to be
Master of Accounts
Adding up the gifts
Who says that accountants
Are a bunch of stiffs?
Likes his little jokes
Thinks he's quite a wit
Likes to take a bland report and play with it
Searching for the Funds of Mordor
Raiding the Lost Dividends
If Advocate's in danger
Just watch him – see how he defends!
Master of accounts
Keeper of the cash
There to reimburse 'em
Or to raid his stash
Paying for the wine
Food they will consume
Letting Miss America
Stay in his room
Happy now he's got a P-Card
Discover Card's got a break
Card Services stopped calling
Checking that his purchases weren't fake
Master of accounts
But you'd never guess
That his former office had
been quite a mess
Boxes over here
Boxes over there
Got a box of rumpled purple
Ties to wear
Every shirt has got an ink stain
From the pens he keeps at hand
The way he matches patterns
One might think his outfits weren't planned
Enter, good sir
Hand me your note
Tell me your tale
I'll give you a quote
You say this thing
Is without price
The IRS
Will tell you “no dice”
If it can be sold
Then it has a price
Find the market value
And that will suffice
Guess he's got you there
Guess it's for the best
Just a bit obnoxious
In his sweater vest
Expert on the rules
Tries to be your guide
May sound like a lawyer
but he's on your side
Know-it-alls are sometimes welcome
When they keep us on our toes
Number's out of whack? Just
Balance it out right by year-end close!
Give or take a mil
Every now and then
Not a real number if it's less than ten
Here he rounded up
There he took a guess
It's a ballpark figure
But it's more or less
When it comes to fixing budgets
There are lots of tricks he knows
Raises and increases
All those bits and pieces
Oh, but it's amazing how it grows!
Master of accounts
Setting up the T's
Solving complex problems as if
It's a breeze
Gifts beyond belief
Gifts beyond compare
Put them in a fund account
But then beware
Donors' gifts are all restricted
To the funds they gave them to
Get them in the system
And make sure they all get a thank-you
When he was born
No LGH was there
But deaconesses
of that baby Jim took care
Master of accounts
Worked at Ravenswood
FMG and Bethany he understood
Worked his way on up
Was a parking clerk
Went to school for business
And accounting work
Ravenswood was so much closer
back then he could walk to work
But gunshots fired past his window
wasn't that much of a perk
Master of Accounts!
Master of his staff!
Dads are never silly
but he makes us laugh!
What a fiscal whiz
What a numbers pro
Keeping track of transfers
While they raise the dough
Helped to build a great Foundation!
Helped them meet the goal amounts!
Everybody raise a toast!
Don't know how they'll fill his post!
Everybody raise a toast to
The Master of Accounts!
Since the song has several in-jokes and references to things that you may not know or understand if you don't know or work with our dad, here are some explanatory notes:
EXPLANATORY NOTES:
“The best bean-counter in town”
Dad is a CPA (Certified Public Accountant), although he doesn't usually do actual book keeping these days. But as accountants in general are often derisively called bean-counters, one year his co-workers gifted him with a big jar of jellybeans for him to count.
“Likes to take a bland account and play with it
Searching for the Funds of Mordor
Raiding the Lost dividends”
Dad and his finance team liked to have a little fun with their presentations at the annual board meeting. So they would some years adopt a humorous “theme” for their presentation, sometimes including a little brief comedy skit parodying some popular movie of the times. Apparently the “Funds of Mordor” and “Raiders of the Lost Dividends” are two of those parody skits.
“If Advocate's in danger”
The chain of hospitals he worked for and raised money for was called Advocate Health Care.
“Keeper of the Cash”
One of his duties at the Advocate Charitable Foundation was being in charge of the Petty Cash fund, a duty he manged to both be lenient and scrupulously honest about.
“Paying for the Wine”
For a long time, the corporate credit cards he and others carried for the Foundation were banned from being used to buy alcohol and several other things. But many of the gala parties and other events they threw had open bars or wine lists. So someone had to pay for such things, and that usually meant charging it on Dad's personal Discover Card and then submitting an expense report for later reimbursement. Which meant he got to keep the 1% cash back bonus on bar tabs that could run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Letting Miss America Stay In His Room”
Like first ladies, each Miss America is expected to pick a charity, advocacy cause, or social-welfare issue and spend their term of office raising money and awareness about it. One year, Miss America picked some sort of children's health care issue as her cause-celebre, and one of the little awareness-raising speeches she gave while touring the country was at one of the Advocate hospitals. Since it was a fundraising event, the Foundation got the responsibility for playing host to Miss America during her visit. Once more, Dad's Discover Card got used to pay for her hotel room for the night. “Just in case anything went wrong”, he of course volunteered to show up and help her with check-in, but in the end his presence wasn't needed.
“Happy now he's got a P-Card”
Eventually, they got a new corporate credit card that COULD be used for pretty much anything, so they stopped having to charge 50 grand a year or so of miscellaneous expenses to Dad's personal credit card and reimburse him later.
“Card services stopped calling”
We indeed would get frequent phone calls from Discover Card Services to alert us of “suspicious activity” whenever he got stuck with paying for thousand-dollar restaurant bills or twelve grand worth of booze at a golf resort.
“His former office had been quite a mess”
Legendarily so. The company moved the entire Foundation to a different office block in a different suburb a month before his retirement as a way to force Dad to clean his office during the process of moving it. After seeing two different pics of Dad, one taken in his office at work and one in his computer room at home, both times with shelves behind him stuffed to overflowing with papers and file folders and 3-ring binders, one friend of the family once asked, “Is he constantly surrounded at all times by boxes of paper?”
“Got a box of rumpled purple ties to wear”
Advocate's corporate color scheme was purple-and-white, so when our family bought dad neckties for Christmas or Father's Day, we usually would include at least one that was “Advocate Purple”. And Dad indeed kept a couple of ties in a box in his office in case he ruined one at lunch or forgot to put one on before leaving the house in the morning.
“Every shirt has got an ink stain”
Yep, pretty much every dress shirt he owned eventually sported a blotchy ink stain on one of the pockets, and every pair of pants ended up with an ink-stained pocket or two, due to his habit of carrying around pens without caps and his refusal to go full-bore geek and just get a pocket protector already.
“The way he matches patterns”
Before we started giving him purple ties, back in the horrible-fashion days of the 1970's and 1980's, he had a truly amazing collection of incredibly loud and ugly ties. The 1990's fad for patterned dress shirts did not mix well with his already-existing collection of loud ties.
“You say this thing is without price”
Not all the gifts donated to the Foundation were in the form of money. Artworks by famous artists such as Salvador Dali and Jeff Koons, front-row tickets to sold-out concerts, shares or entire portfolios of stock, parcels of land in Arizona, and on one memorable occasion a titanium artificial hip implant that was still part of the donor's living wife at the time. All of them needed to be valuated and declared to the IRS as tax-deductible gifts-in-kind. Sometimes donors aren't interested in the tax break that comes with donation and try to declare that an item was without value or priceless, but Dad had to put an exact dollars-and-cents amount on things like “lunch with Mayor Daley”.
“Just a bit obnoxious in his sweater vest”
Yep, Dad also had quite a collection of sleeveless sweater vests, which he'd wear under his suitcoat in all sorts of weather, including the hottest days of summer. In later years, many of these too were Advocate Purple.
“May sound like a lawyer”
Dad was not and is not a lawyer, but in his work he had to be familiar with a bewildering variety of arcane and obscure laws governing the sort of financial shenanigans that big companies and rich donors looking for a tax break can get up to. Dad was often the one who had to break it to someone higher up the corporate ladder that their latest clever idea was in fact illegal.
“Give or take a mil”
One of Dad's nickmanes at work was Jim “Give or take a million” Hohner. He apparently once was forced to admit that a particular projection was only accurate to within “give or take a million” due to a particularly volatile time in the stock market making it impossible to be more specific as to the value of a given portfolio of investments.
“Not a real number if its less than ten”
For someone who handles numbers all day long, Dad sometimes makes the most infuriating errors in basic arithmetic. Mom's usual response to this is to point out to him that “a number isn't really a number without a few zeros behind it and a dollar sign in front of it.”
“Setting up the T's”
T-Accounts are a basic tool of accounting. When Big Brother was just a baby, Dad once taught him by rote memory to memorize the parts of a T-account and point to them in order on command. Showing this ability off to his boss of the time, the boss exclaimed, “Jim, you may have just trained up your replacement!”
“Donors' gifts are all restricted”
Many donations to the foundation are indeed restricted. If someone donates a million dollars to a cancer ward, you gotta spend that million dollars on the cancer ward and not on the cardiac floor or the emergency room. Making sure each donation went into the right account and got spent on the right sort of things was a major part of Dad's work with the Foundation. Others did most of the actual fundraising, Dad handled spending the money they raised on the projects they raised 'em for.
“When he was born, no LGH was there”
The hospital Dad was born in on the West Side of Chicago would later become Lutheran General Hospital and one of the founding hospitals of Evangelical Health Services, which later became Advoate Health Care.
“But Deaconesses of that Baby Jim Took Care”
Before it was Lutheran General, it was run by some order of nuns or somesuch.
“Worked at Ravenswood”
A few months after Big Brother was born, Dad got a job working for Ravenswood Hospital Medical Center, at the time an independent hospital, but it later became affiliated with what would soon afterwards become Advocate.
“FMG and Bethany he understood”
FMG is Field Medical Group, a clinic a block down the street from Ravenswood Hospital that Ravenswood bought out and then put Dad in charge of as Administrator, one of his first big promotions. Bethany is another hospital in the Advocate system.
“Was a parking clerk”
Before he worked for Ravenswood, Dad worked as a clerk in the Parking department at the University of Illinois At Chicago and their associated hospital.
“Went to School for Business and Accounting Work”
Dad took his CPA exam in 1975, getting the second highest score in Illinois for that year and one of the 70 highest scores in the country. He also got an MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg school of Management in the early 1980's.
“Ravenswood was so much closer”
Ravenswood hospital was only a few blocks from our house, and so was Field Medical Group. In those days he would walk to work if the weather was nice. When he got moved to the Foundation, he had to commute several miles out to the suburbs.
“Gunshots fired past his window”
When Dad worked at Ravenswood, at one point his office was in a former X-Ray examination room on the ground floor, right next to the alley behind the hospital. One day in 1998, a 15-year-old black teenager was shot while playing basketball in the alley right outiside Dad's office window. The boy was carried/dragged by his friends to the emergency room ramp at the end of the alley, but they couldn't get him up the ramp and the emergency room staff refused to go outside and render aid, instead calling an ambulance to take him to the much-better-equipped Level One Trauma Center emergency room at Illinois Masonic Hospital a couple of miles away. Eventually they did get someone to bring him in, but he died before the ambulance arrived. This became a public relations nightmare and a national scandal, with Dad's boss getting interviewed on 60 Minutes and President Clinton personally ordering Medicare to stop paying its bills to Ravenswood until they changed the policy against going out to help people dying on their doorstep.
“Dads are never silly”
One of dad's favorite sayings. Whenver he says something silly and Lolua calls him silly, he'll reply, “But Dads are never silly!”
“Don't know how they'll fill his post”
We joked for years that dad had great job security, since they'd have to hire at least three people to replace him and all the stuff he did. And as his retirement drew near, they did indeed expand his department from two people to four, which we interpreted as “training up the two or three people it will take to replace Dad”. And then he retired, and they shrank it back down to two people again, so Dad joked that in fact, they'd replaced him with negative two people, since they no longer needed someone to correct all his mistakes.
The song in question is a parody of a memorable crowd-pleaser of a tune from Les Miserables, the stage musical. Here's a youtube clip with lyrics of the original song we parodied:
And here's our parody lyrics:
MASTER OF ACCOUNTS
(with apologies to Schonberg and Kretzmer)
Parody lyrics by Lolua, Big Brother, and Mother Superior
Welcome, good sir
Sit yourself down
And meet the best
Bean-counter in town
As for the rest
All of them crooks
Filching the Gifts
And Cooking the Books
Seldom do you see
Honest men like he
A gent of good intent
Who's content to be
Master of Accounts
Adding up the gifts
Who says that accountants
Are a bunch of stiffs?
Likes his little jokes
Thinks he's quite a wit
Likes to take a bland report and play with it
Searching for the Funds of Mordor
Raiding the Lost Dividends
If Advocate's in danger
Just watch him – see how he defends!
Master of accounts
Keeper of the cash
There to reimburse 'em
Or to raid his stash
Paying for the wine
Food they will consume
Letting Miss America
Stay in his room
Happy now he's got a P-Card
Discover Card's got a break
Card Services stopped calling
Checking that his purchases weren't fake
Master of accounts
But you'd never guess
That his former office had
been quite a mess
Boxes over here
Boxes over there
Got a box of rumpled purple
Ties to wear
Every shirt has got an ink stain
From the pens he keeps at hand
The way he matches patterns
One might think his outfits weren't planned
Enter, good sir
Hand me your note
Tell me your tale
I'll give you a quote
You say this thing
Is without price
The IRS
Will tell you “no dice”
If it can be sold
Then it has a price
Find the market value
And that will suffice
Guess he's got you there
Guess it's for the best
Just a bit obnoxious
In his sweater vest
Expert on the rules
Tries to be your guide
May sound like a lawyer
but he's on your side
Know-it-alls are sometimes welcome
When they keep us on our toes
Number's out of whack? Just
Balance it out right by year-end close!
Give or take a mil
Every now and then
Not a real number if it's less than ten
Here he rounded up
There he took a guess
It's a ballpark figure
But it's more or less
When it comes to fixing budgets
There are lots of tricks he knows
Raises and increases
All those bits and pieces
Oh, but it's amazing how it grows!
Master of accounts
Setting up the T's
Solving complex problems as if
It's a breeze
Gifts beyond belief
Gifts beyond compare
Put them in a fund account
But then beware
Donors' gifts are all restricted
To the funds they gave them to
Get them in the system
And make sure they all get a thank-you
When he was born
No LGH was there
But deaconesses
of that baby Jim took care
Master of accounts
Worked at Ravenswood
FMG and Bethany he understood
Worked his way on up
Was a parking clerk
Went to school for business
And accounting work
Ravenswood was so much closer
back then he could walk to work
But gunshots fired past his window
wasn't that much of a perk
Master of Accounts!
Master of his staff!
Dads are never silly
but he makes us laugh!
What a fiscal whiz
What a numbers pro
Keeping track of transfers
While they raise the dough
Helped to build a great Foundation!
Helped them meet the goal amounts!
Everybody raise a toast!
Don't know how they'll fill his post!
Everybody raise a toast to
The Master of Accounts!
Since the song has several in-jokes and references to things that you may not know or understand if you don't know or work with our dad, here are some explanatory notes:
EXPLANATORY NOTES:
“The best bean-counter in town”
Dad is a CPA (Certified Public Accountant), although he doesn't usually do actual book keeping these days. But as accountants in general are often derisively called bean-counters, one year his co-workers gifted him with a big jar of jellybeans for him to count.
“Likes to take a bland account and play with it
Searching for the Funds of Mordor
Raiding the Lost dividends”
Dad and his finance team liked to have a little fun with their presentations at the annual board meeting. So they would some years adopt a humorous “theme” for their presentation, sometimes including a little brief comedy skit parodying some popular movie of the times. Apparently the “Funds of Mordor” and “Raiders of the Lost Dividends” are two of those parody skits.
“If Advocate's in danger”
The chain of hospitals he worked for and raised money for was called Advocate Health Care.
“Keeper of the Cash”
One of his duties at the Advocate Charitable Foundation was being in charge of the Petty Cash fund, a duty he manged to both be lenient and scrupulously honest about.
“Paying for the Wine”
For a long time, the corporate credit cards he and others carried for the Foundation were banned from being used to buy alcohol and several other things. But many of the gala parties and other events they threw had open bars or wine lists. So someone had to pay for such things, and that usually meant charging it on Dad's personal Discover Card and then submitting an expense report for later reimbursement. Which meant he got to keep the 1% cash back bonus on bar tabs that could run into the tens of thousands of dollars.
“Letting Miss America Stay In His Room”
Like first ladies, each Miss America is expected to pick a charity, advocacy cause, or social-welfare issue and spend their term of office raising money and awareness about it. One year, Miss America picked some sort of children's health care issue as her cause-celebre, and one of the little awareness-raising speeches she gave while touring the country was at one of the Advocate hospitals. Since it was a fundraising event, the Foundation got the responsibility for playing host to Miss America during her visit. Once more, Dad's Discover Card got used to pay for her hotel room for the night. “Just in case anything went wrong”, he of course volunteered to show up and help her with check-in, but in the end his presence wasn't needed.
“Happy now he's got a P-Card”
Eventually, they got a new corporate credit card that COULD be used for pretty much anything, so they stopped having to charge 50 grand a year or so of miscellaneous expenses to Dad's personal credit card and reimburse him later.
“Card services stopped calling”
We indeed would get frequent phone calls from Discover Card Services to alert us of “suspicious activity” whenever he got stuck with paying for thousand-dollar restaurant bills or twelve grand worth of booze at a golf resort.
“His former office had been quite a mess”
Legendarily so. The company moved the entire Foundation to a different office block in a different suburb a month before his retirement as a way to force Dad to clean his office during the process of moving it. After seeing two different pics of Dad, one taken in his office at work and one in his computer room at home, both times with shelves behind him stuffed to overflowing with papers and file folders and 3-ring binders, one friend of the family once asked, “Is he constantly surrounded at all times by boxes of paper?”
“Got a box of rumpled purple ties to wear”
Advocate's corporate color scheme was purple-and-white, so when our family bought dad neckties for Christmas or Father's Day, we usually would include at least one that was “Advocate Purple”. And Dad indeed kept a couple of ties in a box in his office in case he ruined one at lunch or forgot to put one on before leaving the house in the morning.
“Every shirt has got an ink stain”
Yep, pretty much every dress shirt he owned eventually sported a blotchy ink stain on one of the pockets, and every pair of pants ended up with an ink-stained pocket or two, due to his habit of carrying around pens without caps and his refusal to go full-bore geek and just get a pocket protector already.
“The way he matches patterns”
Before we started giving him purple ties, back in the horrible-fashion days of the 1970's and 1980's, he had a truly amazing collection of incredibly loud and ugly ties. The 1990's fad for patterned dress shirts did not mix well with his already-existing collection of loud ties.
“You say this thing is without price”
Not all the gifts donated to the Foundation were in the form of money. Artworks by famous artists such as Salvador Dali and Jeff Koons, front-row tickets to sold-out concerts, shares or entire portfolios of stock, parcels of land in Arizona, and on one memorable occasion a titanium artificial hip implant that was still part of the donor's living wife at the time. All of them needed to be valuated and declared to the IRS as tax-deductible gifts-in-kind. Sometimes donors aren't interested in the tax break that comes with donation and try to declare that an item was without value or priceless, but Dad had to put an exact dollars-and-cents amount on things like “lunch with Mayor Daley”.
“Just a bit obnoxious in his sweater vest”
Yep, Dad also had quite a collection of sleeveless sweater vests, which he'd wear under his suitcoat in all sorts of weather, including the hottest days of summer. In later years, many of these too were Advocate Purple.
“May sound like a lawyer”
Dad was not and is not a lawyer, but in his work he had to be familiar with a bewildering variety of arcane and obscure laws governing the sort of financial shenanigans that big companies and rich donors looking for a tax break can get up to. Dad was often the one who had to break it to someone higher up the corporate ladder that their latest clever idea was in fact illegal.
“Give or take a mil”
One of Dad's nickmanes at work was Jim “Give or take a million” Hohner. He apparently once was forced to admit that a particular projection was only accurate to within “give or take a million” due to a particularly volatile time in the stock market making it impossible to be more specific as to the value of a given portfolio of investments.
“Not a real number if its less than ten”
For someone who handles numbers all day long, Dad sometimes makes the most infuriating errors in basic arithmetic. Mom's usual response to this is to point out to him that “a number isn't really a number without a few zeros behind it and a dollar sign in front of it.”
“Setting up the T's”
T-Accounts are a basic tool of accounting. When Big Brother was just a baby, Dad once taught him by rote memory to memorize the parts of a T-account and point to them in order on command. Showing this ability off to his boss of the time, the boss exclaimed, “Jim, you may have just trained up your replacement!”
“Donors' gifts are all restricted”
Many donations to the foundation are indeed restricted. If someone donates a million dollars to a cancer ward, you gotta spend that million dollars on the cancer ward and not on the cardiac floor or the emergency room. Making sure each donation went into the right account and got spent on the right sort of things was a major part of Dad's work with the Foundation. Others did most of the actual fundraising, Dad handled spending the money they raised on the projects they raised 'em for.
“When he was born, no LGH was there”
The hospital Dad was born in on the West Side of Chicago would later become Lutheran General Hospital and one of the founding hospitals of Evangelical Health Services, which later became Advoate Health Care.
“But Deaconesses of that Baby Jim Took Care”
Before it was Lutheran General, it was run by some order of nuns or somesuch.
“Worked at Ravenswood”
A few months after Big Brother was born, Dad got a job working for Ravenswood Hospital Medical Center, at the time an independent hospital, but it later became affiliated with what would soon afterwards become Advocate.
“FMG and Bethany he understood”
FMG is Field Medical Group, a clinic a block down the street from Ravenswood Hospital that Ravenswood bought out and then put Dad in charge of as Administrator, one of his first big promotions. Bethany is another hospital in the Advocate system.
“Was a parking clerk”
Before he worked for Ravenswood, Dad worked as a clerk in the Parking department at the University of Illinois At Chicago and their associated hospital.
“Went to School for Business and Accounting Work”
Dad took his CPA exam in 1975, getting the second highest score in Illinois for that year and one of the 70 highest scores in the country. He also got an MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg school of Management in the early 1980's.
“Ravenswood was so much closer”
Ravenswood hospital was only a few blocks from our house, and so was Field Medical Group. In those days he would walk to work if the weather was nice. When he got moved to the Foundation, he had to commute several miles out to the suburbs.
“Gunshots fired past his window”
When Dad worked at Ravenswood, at one point his office was in a former X-Ray examination room on the ground floor, right next to the alley behind the hospital. One day in 1998, a 15-year-old black teenager was shot while playing basketball in the alley right outiside Dad's office window. The boy was carried/dragged by his friends to the emergency room ramp at the end of the alley, but they couldn't get him up the ramp and the emergency room staff refused to go outside and render aid, instead calling an ambulance to take him to the much-better-equipped Level One Trauma Center emergency room at Illinois Masonic Hospital a couple of miles away. Eventually they did get someone to bring him in, but he died before the ambulance arrived. This became a public relations nightmare and a national scandal, with Dad's boss getting interviewed on 60 Minutes and President Clinton personally ordering Medicare to stop paying its bills to Ravenswood until they changed the policy against going out to help people dying on their doorstep.
“Dads are never silly”
One of dad's favorite sayings. Whenver he says something silly and Lolua calls him silly, he'll reply, “But Dads are never silly!”
“Don't know how they'll fill his post”
We joked for years that dad had great job security, since they'd have to hire at least three people to replace him and all the stuff he did. And as his retirement drew near, they did indeed expand his department from two people to four, which we interpreted as “training up the two or three people it will take to replace Dad”. And then he retired, and they shrank it back down to two people again, so Dad joked that in fact, they'd replaced him with negative two people, since they no longer needed someone to correct all his mistakes.
