1. First, they receive the manufacturer’s manual (never to be read) and the company laptop bag (bulky enough to stop bullets).
2. Then without fail, accountants put an order to their IT department for an extra power cord, a privacy screen, and an USB keypad.
3. Accountants going above and beyond might even order a laptop dock, an additional monitor, a wireless keyboard, and so on in order to properly intimidate the interns.

The point of this post is the privacy screen. Accountants rely on this crucial piece of technology to protect their secrets. Secrets here doesn’t refer to confidential company information as you would imagine, but it in fact refers to the fact that they are secretly sending instant messages, checking sports updates, and poking friends on facebook.

You may wonder why large, multi-national companies would spend so much money to provide laptops, technical training, and office space just so an accountant can stream youtube videos on a computer that is heavily monitored by tracking software and hide behind a privacy screen. The simple answer is that accountants need to look busy to their peers so they can maintain ridiculous charge rates. After spending the morning getting coffee and the afternoon recovering from lunch by surfing the web, accountants are forced to put in extra hours to stay on top of their work.

The privacy screen is important to an accountant – not for what it is supposed to do – but because it allows accountants to procrastinate all day long and then spend the evening working unpaid overtime and complaining.