Remember those papers from elementary school where you connect the dots. Some kids could never see the picture in the connect-the-dot drawing until they had virtually connected all the dots. Me, I could look at a page full of dots and almost immediately say, "Oh, that's an elephant" or "That's a locomotive."
Some people handle two-dimensional visualisation better than others, but largely it's a matter of practice: the more connect-the-dot drawings you do, the more likely you are to recognise the design quite early on.
And as with those pictures among the dots, it's also a matter of learning to look when it comes to auditing. And not just to look but where to look, and how to look. From my first brief encounter with auditing in the firm of chartered accountans of Hancock, Woodward & Neill in Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, I have always been hooked on auditing.
I was always an auditor first, and an accountant or systems analyst or computer programmer second, because asking "Now where have I seen this before?" has always made my looking more focused and less vague.
And so it was that Lawrence B. Sawyer's book "The Practice of Modern Internal Auditing" (which at the time was to auditing what "Gray's Anatomy" has been to medicine) became the one book I carried with me from job to job across fifteen countries, but not before I had joined The Institute of Internal Auditors, Inc. in early 1971 while working as senior auditor on the giant Bougainville Copper Project in Papua New Guinea.
This book, together with others dealing with accounting standards or IATA rules or laytime calculation or charter parties or case studies in forensic auditing, sits now forgotten in a dark corner of my library, as I've found time to be more widely-read so as to belatedly gain more insight into the people I had met and the places I had lived in then.
When I lived in Greece in the early 80s I visited Hydra several times without ever knowing anything about George Johnston who with his wife Charmian Clift lived for some eight years on the island. George Johnston is of course best known for his book "My Brother Jack" and I have read every one of his many other books since.
Several times I holidayed at my boss's villa on Messonghi Beach on Corfu without ever having heard of the Durrells and their years on the island, let alone having read Gerald or Lawrence Durrell's many books.
When I worked in Port Moresby, one of the old accountants in my office was a Mr Chipps, and the whole office would chortle "Goodbye, Mr. Chips", every time he left the office without my ever realising that they were making a literary reference to James Hilton's famous book.
And of course the same James Hilton wrote "Lost Horizon" in which he gave us the word "Shangri-La". Indeed, the Shangri-La hotel chain bought the rights to his book and placed a copy on every bedside table in place of the usual Gideon Bible. I knew nothing of this when I stayed at various Shangri-La Hotels in Malaysia and Singapore and I had barely heard of Hermann Hesse when I stayed in the suite named after him in the Raffle Hotel in Singapore.
I visited Pago Pago when I worked in Western Samoa without ever having read Somerset Maugham's short story "Rain" and lived in Rangoon before I had ever heard of Rudyard Kipling's "On the Road to Mandalay". Even Saudi Arabia would've held a greater fascination for me if at the time I had already read T.E. Lawrence's famous "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".
How much richer my travels would've been had I been able to read all those books back then. However, I have since then in retirement found time to also dip into John Donne's "No Man is an Island" and Boethius's "The Consolation of Philosophy", so things are beginning to balance out.
