I've been doing a spot of accounting at work over the last few months. This is clearly a failure of delegation and management on my part, but it has led to at least one deep observation that I mightn't have had otherwise.

Accountants are secretly time travelers.

Perhaps that is a slight exaggeration. They don't ACTUALLY travel through time. But if you hang out with them a bit and observe their twisted time and verb conjugation ... well it's obvious that they would be right at home hopping around a branching multiverse.

For example, there we were at the end of June. Topic at hand: things that are going to happen in May, from the perspective of late April. Casual conversations include things like "If we put the new rule into place in late June, then when May hits we'll have to go all the way back to February to get the correct outcome". Mind bending! Daily conversation, without anyone blinking an eye.

Alternate timelines are discussed quite a bit also. They aren't quite stated this way, but basically they go along thinking in terms of events from timeline A, and then decide "No! Wait! We aren't in timeline A, we are in timeline B!!!!" and maybe freak out a little about how they now have to rewrite history to match the current reality or perhaps adjust the perception of the current reality to match the new history. Some of it even appears to be experimental, running simulations on previous events to try to see how it changes the present (well ... and the future).

One thing I'm glad of is the ethical standards to which time travelers.... er... accountants adhere. There is an ongoing insistence that no matter what timeline they find themselves in, they should reconcile with the past and ever move to a more obvious and simple future. Try not to change the facts of the past, but if you do please keep some integrity in the universe so it can have some degree of cohesion in the present.

Anyway. Take my advice. If you go adventuring around in your time machine, bring an accountant to keep track of what is going on.