David Letterman's retirement has me feeling nostalgic this week, capital market servants. It was the first TV show my parents didn't want me staying up late to watch. I defied their wishes, of course, so when he moved to CBS and was on an hour earlier, it was even easier to watch Dave's irreverent, sarcastic, self-deprecating, and occasionally crass genius on display. My folks didn't stand a chance. Letterman's whackiness warped my brain every night starting in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.  

 

Anyhoo, I suppose this post — well, the title of it anyway — is a little nod to Dave. It was inspired by this dopey tweet:

Acronyms, as you well know, are the lifeblood of communication in the accounting profession. As professional service busybodies, accountants don't have the time to say exactly what they mean, rather they rattle off sentences that sound like, "Can you review those PBCs ASAP?" or "I have a meeting with the OMP about KAM in the AM" or "If I don't have anything useful to say about the P&L, it could be a CML."

 

Not to mention firms themselves. We're in an era of firms discarding their names for initials because BRANDING and "that's how clients refer to us anyway," or some other horseshit reason.

I guess what I'm saying here is that acronyms in the accounting profession are out of control to such an extent that it's become parody. PwC relied on CAKE as audit assurancefor God's sake.