I felt like the victim of a plot. Sometimes my mistake was forgetting to enter an ATM withdrawal, or ordering new checks and forgetting to record the fee. I wished for the days of trading zucchinis and chicken eggs for services. You deliver my baby, I'll build you a rowboat. We do what we think will contribute to the future of mankind, and get our compensation that way.
Some people feel great satisfaction from the search and destroy tactics of good bookkeeping.
Keeping track of details like that gave me anxiety. But I have come to realize now that precision numbers have a place in the world. While his body grew more emaciated, and all about him was pestilence, death and destruction, his mind refused to accept defeat and followed paths of numbers which, at his bidding, performed miraculous feats. He visualized gigantic numbers to be added and he set himself the task of totaling them. We used the book for a few months to teach our children an alternative method for calculating numbers.