In my job I do a lot of journals, which means systematically recording transactions by way of double entries. So I know how money is spent, what's going on with the cash ledger and sometimes, I need to reconcile it with the money in the bank. It's not too complicated, although it probably helps to be armed with some AA101 knowledge, and I felt I was doing a pretty good job. But yesterday, I came across the messiest account I've ever seen and for the first time, I felt like I was having an occupational crisis.

It was my own bank account that threw me.

So my bank book shows that I've been spending a lot since the last time I updated it, a good five months ago. And you know how this thing works when you don't update your bank book frequently enough - all the old transactions are consolidated, leaving only the more recent records there. But even then, as I tried to analyse those recent items in the withdrawal column, I could hardly trace them to my spending memory. The number of $20 ATM withdrawals is amazingly high, and it befuddles me why I had needed so much money. And then there are the many mysterious NETS transactions of which I could only recall a few.

In the end, I just gave up beating my brains out to remember where I had been and what I was doing to warrant those expenditures and decided somebody must have hacked into my account and taken my money away.

No wonder they say accountants make the worst clients.