A STOP-sign of the times

Did you know that holding up a STOP-sign requires the completion of a "nationally recognised training course"? On completion of said course, one is handed a 'blue card' and presumably allowed to call oneself a "Traffic Controller, W.A.L.O.B.".

I was reminded of this certification-nonsense-gone-mad when I heard again from an old friend who back in the 1970s had been on the Bougainville Project with me. He had spent the last ten years doing workers compensation wage audits - a mundane job if ever there was one - but was made redundant about twelve months ago when it became mandatory that all personnel working on such jobs had to have a university degree. He is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants and holds a practising certificate in his own right and yet they deemed it insufficient to meet their criteria!

Nobody of my generation ever went to university to become an accountant. It was correspondence courses or evening classes at best, and the rest was the "University of Life ". Having started work at the age of 14, I myself graduated summa cum laude from the "School of Hard Knocks". The rest was 'learning on the job' with a few lucky breaks such as signing up with Mr Manfred Weber for a professional articleship in Germany despite my lack of a high-school education (1960), and being hired as a bank officer by the ANZ Bank's then Canberra manager, Mr Robert Reid, when I arrived in Australia with no money and even less English (1965), and passing the friendly Mr McFadden's interview in Canberra and being sent up to the Rabaul branch of his chartered accountants' firm of Hancock, Woodward & Neill (1970). Thank you, Messrs. Weber, Reid and McFadden! I am sure you have all gone to Heaven!

So where would I be today had I done 'the done thing' and completed high school and university (not that there had ever been any money for such luxury)? Perhaps I'd be doing workers compensation wage audits in Germany instead of having followed my motto "Have pen, will travel!"

Brings to mind W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Verger", doesn't it?