Special Guest Blogger: Kushim

I am Kushim, the World’s first Accountant but I never wanted to be a legend. I just wanted to be a guy who knew exactly where the barley went.
If you’re reading this, it means humanity’s obsession with recording things has officially reached a fever pitch. You’re scanning marks on a screen and found me, the first named person in recorded History.
Do you know how embarrassing that is? I’m essentially the patron saint of middle management. When you think of the dawn of civilization, you probably picture some priest-king building a Ziggurat to the gods. You don’t picture a guy in a dusty room in Uruk, poking a reed into a wet brick of clay because he’s worried about a missing sack of grain.
People romanticise the Uruk period. They talk about the invention of the wheel, the birth of the city-state, the sophistication of irrigation. Let me tell you what it was really like, it was damp, hot and it smelled intensely of fermented grain and sheep manure.
My day-to-day life wasn't spent pondering the secrets of the universe. It was spent documenting inventory.
I was the human equivalent of a modern day spreadsheet. If you’ve ever sat at a desk, staring at a flickering monitor, wondering if your existence is defined by the number of invoices you process in a day, take comfort in this: I was doing that 5,000 years ago. I was the OG of the signed invoice. I didn’t have a boss, I had a temple hierarchy that would probably have me executed if I miscounted a bushel of wheat.
I didn’t set out to be famous. I didn’t set out to change the world. I just wanted my barley ledger to balance so I could go home, eat some flatbread, and sleep on a pile of furs without someone waking me up to ask where the inventory went but my name got baked into literal clay.
You guys have gone from clay tablets to smartphones. You have automated my misery. You have global supply chains, international trade agreements, and cloud-based accounting software and yet, you’re still doing exactly what I was doing, tracking stuff.
My legacy then isn't an epic poem or a majestic statue,  it’s the receipt but we need to know who has what, how much of it they have, and most importantly who owes who and if you feel like your job is just an endless parade of paperwork, stop. Take a breath. Look up at the sky and remember that 5,000 years ago, I was doing the same thing you’re doing, and I ended up in the history books.
Now, get back to work. Those invoices aren't going to sign themselves.