Every worry that your day job may be hurting your love life? Just in time for Valentine's Day, "If I Were An Auditor," a parody of Bobby Darin's hit song "If I Were A Carpenter," ponders that question in a new music video created in Second Life, a virtual online world. Not only that, it may help you classify some assets, tangible and otherwise.
In this finance version of the song, the avatar singer no longer worries about whether his love will find fault with him being a tinker or working with wood. Instead, the crooners ask: "If I were an auditor, and you were a lady...would you hold me or trade me?...or would you second guess me, like everybody following behind me?" Getting to the problems many accounting firms face with providing work/life balance, the song continues: "If I worked a million hours, in audit, tax or advising/Would our love grow every day, or only be amortizing?"
Edith Orenstein, director of accounting policy analysis and communications and blogger on all things accounting for Financial Executives International says she wrote the new lyrics to one of her lifelong favorite songs in a moment of "inspiration" in 2008. She then worked with "Singing CPA" Steven Zelin to refine them, and enlisted the Maryland Association of CPA, which has an extensive Second Life presence through its CPA Island, to produce it. (For more on CPA Island, see our previous blog post.)
The "core" of the parody, according to Orenstein's liner notes, is the phrase "would you give me sale treatment or tell me I was borrowed?" "Not only does it rhyme with 'sorrow' [the previous line], it draws an analogy from accounting to marriage," the notes read. "'Sale treatment' means getting married, versus 'borrowed" which means the person was just being used for a time, but not being permanently 'transferred' or betrothed to the other person."
Orenstein, who says she is only an infrequent user of Second Life, developed the idea in part as a marketing device for her FEI blog. "It's really putting something new and different out there to attract some new folks to the blog. And, of course, it's a fun project as well," she says, noting carefully that she did not craft the idea on company time.
For a look at the final product, follow the links in this blog or go directly to it here. |
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