Continuing the family tradition

My father spent his 30 year plus career in the British civil service, working alongside accountants. I spent 13 years as an active accountant before moving full time into the computer business. Now my daughter (aged 23 and a half) has announced that she is going to take an accountancy course at a college. She's continuing the family tradition.

This is quite a turn-around for her, as until now all her jobs have been people orientated. She's been a shift manager at a few cafes in the local vicinity (she helped start one such cafe, and simply dropping her name was enough to get a job there for her brother), she managed a stall in the arcades of New Zealand and Australia, and worked for nearly a year in customer support for one of Israel's cellphone companies (hardly anybody survives a year). So it was quite a surprise for me when she announced her intention to turn her back on people and start working with figures.

We had a long discussion on the subject a few weeks ago, in which I played the devil's advocate. When I mentioned the people orientation of all her previous jobs, she replied that these were the only jobs available to her. This may well be so: over the past thirty years, services have become more and more important, to the detriment of other kinds of jobs. Almost all of my jobs (bakery, chicken hatchery, food analyst, accountant, programmer) date from at least twenty years ago, and none of them are people orientated. The only people orientated job which I undertook in my early days was running the kitchens in my first kibbutz, and that was far from a total success.

I was fortunate to have started work when accountancy was already computerised; had I started a few years earlier, it would have meant manually writing up entries and then sending them off to a service centre where they would have been computerised. But one doesn't really understand what's happening until one does some manual examples.