What's In a Name?

Camperdown Methodist Church, 1 January 2012, 09h00
Rev Steven Jones

Scripture readings: Isaiah 9: 27; Philippians 2: 5-11; Luke 2: 15-21

How often do you find that what you read and learn in theory does not always readily translate into practice at first? It’s only after a few years “out in the field”, having made many mistakes and bumped a few heads on the way, that we then realise how the two fit together.

I saw this when I was training to be an accountant. One of my colleagues at the small firm we were articled to had a brother who was doing his training at Deloitte, one of the “Big 4” audit firms (or the “Big 5” as it was known then – this was before Enron and the collapse of Arthur Andersen). Now you need to understand how the audit firm pecking order works – those whose daddies are able to send their offspring to varsity full-time complete their degrees first, and are then snapped up by the big boys where they are plonked at clients like Anglo American, Investec, or SA Breweries for three years. Those of us who were born with plastic spoons in our mouths leave school, enrol through UNISA, and join little “mom-and-pop” firms where the sophisticated clients use shoeboxes for their records, the less-sophisticated use dustbin bags, and the unsophisticated have no records at all! So my colleague’s brother tended to thumb his nose at us small-firm plebs with our rats-and-mice clients, until one day he was tasked to complete one of his own client’s tax returns. Despite his already-completed Honours degree and a year in the oak-panelled halls of Deloitte, he simply didn’t know where to start. On the other hand, at our end of the food chain we had been doing tax returns since our second week! [To download the full sermon, click here]