#32 Roller Bags
Mar 23rd, 2009 by pfi
Despite being at home on an airport conveyor belt, accountants have felt the need to adopt the roller bag as one of their own. Roller bags and other fugly equipment (such as fax machines) have become mainstays in the office.
A roller bag, pictured here, is the Frankenstein of office companions. It is part laptop case, part airline traveler, and always awkward. Is the accountant using one really trying to get work done? Or are they trying too hard to lug around work that they need expandable zipper compartments?
For men, a traditional, conservative leather portfolio case would suffice. For women, they have an infinite number of options that doesn’t involve this fashion faux-pas.
A roller bag tells the world that an accountant likes to take around their office – workpapers, binders, and manuals with them – everywhere, all the time. This uncompromising attitude is impressive until you realize that the only thing the accountant has is a good workout. Most of the things in there are simply for reference and unnecessary.
Does any of this seem confusing for accountants? Below is a simple test to determine if what they are using to store their laptop and documents is the fashion equivalent of wearing Crocs.
- Does it have wheels?
- Does it have an retractable handle?
Any ‘Yes’ answers should result in a punishment of having to carry around the laptop, charger, and binders by hand for a week.
Accountants are already overworked, underpaid, and socially-inept creatures. Whoever started this trend of needing to cart around junk on wheels needs to do a rotation into governmental accounting.
I will never use a roller bag! I sport the non laptop bag. Just an oversized purse basically. It has enough room for my shoes for the long walk to work and snacks for throughout the day and of course my laptop
! the first thing i did when i got to the office (after returning from training at a tropical location where i accumulated a lot of lame logo gifts..) was put in an order to exchange my big laptop bag for an even larger roller bag! my roller bag arrived and it was defective. the handle wouldn’t pull out all the way, so i had to crouch to pull it along. it didn’t do well in puddles either…. needless to say, i used it once and never returned my huge laptop bag.
Not buying the roller back stereotype…
really reaching for something here
It’s really only auditors who fit the stereotype of using the roller bags. Actually, I think most of this blog is applicable to auditors more so than other accountants (I say this because I’m an ex-auditor).
My roller bag was an additional appendage to my body while I was an auditor. It became rather deformed because of all the crap I had to shove in it. To this day it still has all my crap shoved in it. I wonder how many miles that bag rolled over the years…
Trust me…when you go on a sales and use tax recovery study
the roller bag is your friend
you could also add that you can tell who spurns the roller bag by their posture in 10 years…
because accountants will still lug that stuff around, even if they are more worried about being trendy than saving their backs!
though i will say – a roller bag and a crowded metro do not go very well together.
ach….of course this blog is about auditors…who else would you mean when the word accountant is used?….an AP clerk… 🙂
Non-audit accountants are simply people that spend 2 days getting me a custom report that I never use because, while I was waiting for the report, I found an alternative procedure and never bothered to tell the ‘accountant’ that I no longer need the requested report.
You’d have to pry my roller bag out of my cold dead hands. It has practically become an extension of my body. I have even mastered the roller bag ollie; so hopping up a curb will never slow me down.
After all, how else could you get your laptop, 2nd monitor, external 10-key, ethernet cable, powerstrip and a ream full of pbc docs around and still have an open hand for… wait for it, another roller bag! (To haul your scanner, field printer and wireless router of course)
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