It was a mystery how Kirk had gotten the job, although that mystery paled in comparison to how he kept it. Sulu thought he had slept with Someone So Far Up The Chain Of Command they didn't know he or she existed, but Sulu had a kind of embarrassing crush on Kirk, and his opinion was therefore invalid. Uhura refused to speculate except to say darkly that there was probably a bar fight and a lot of off-planet substances involved. Chekov was alone in claiming that Kirk was so qualified he didn't need to display his certifications on his wall. No one had ever dared ask Spock what he thought; as far as they could tell, Spock knew (a) every detail of every tax code in the Federation and (b) everything else ever, but never mentioned (b) unless it was relevant to (a).
In retrospect, they probably should have asked Kirk himself, but then again Kirk seemed to have a tragic inability to answer questions with anything approaching normal-person reasons. Which turned out to be the reason he had gotten his own office with a door almost as soon as he walked in the first day. ("This is your keycard. This is Janice Rand, the receptionist. Defy her at your peril. This is the potted plant we all fear and offer weekly sacrifices of fertilizer to. Do not pour the dregs of your coffee in the pot or it will eat all your files.") When Admiral Komack (Starfleet, ret.) walked in for his quarterly glaring session, traditionally everyone tried very hard to look busy. (It wasn't hard; one of the things about working at Enterprise Tax Preparation, LLC, was that you never, ever ran out of things to do. Something was always about to blow up, if only the air conditioning, thanks to Scotty and his inability to rest on his goddamn laurels.)
Kirk, on the other hand, actually came out of his office, with his shiny V-neck shirt and his tight pants, and smiled. Albeit with a lot of teeth. "Admiral," he drawled. "I'm James T. Kirk, your new accountant. Let's see what improbable-and-yet-completely-reasonable deductions we can find you, hmmm?"
That quarter, Admiral Komack's taxes were the lowest they had been since he retired and started going on the subtly-insulting-the-next-generation-of-officers lecture circuit. Almost entirely because Kirk convinced the system that having a secondary residence in the Orion system qualified him to claim dry-cleaning as a business expense. No one knew how he talked the Admiral into officially changing his job description to something that could get past the programming, but they didn't really want to. There had been yelling. And broken furniture. And, rumor had it, Spock punching Kirk in the throat, but no one really believed that. Not really.
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In retrospect, they probably should have asked Kirk himself, but then again Kirk seemed to have a tragic inability to answer questions with anything approaching normal-person reasons. Which turned out to be the reason he had gotten his own office with a door almost as soon as he walked in the first day. ("This is your keycard. This is Janice Rand, the receptionist. Defy her at your peril. This is the potted plant we all fear and offer weekly sacrifices of fertilizer to. Do not pour the dregs of your coffee in the pot or it will eat all your files.") When Admiral Komack (Starfleet, ret.) walked in for his quarterly glaring session, traditionally everyone tried very hard to look busy. (It wasn't hard; one of the things about working at Enterprise Tax Preparation, LLC, was that you never, ever ran out of things to do. Something was always about to blow up, if only the air conditioning, thanks to Scotty and his inability to rest on his goddamn laurels.)
Kirk, on the other hand, actually came out of his office, with his shiny V-neck shirt and his tight pants, and smiled. Albeit with a lot of teeth. "Admiral," he drawled. "I'm James T. Kirk, your new accountant. Let's see what improbable-and-yet-completely-reasonable deductions we can find you, hmmm?"
That quarter, Admiral Komack's taxes were the lowest they had been since he retired and started going on the subtly-insulting-the-next-generation-of-officers lecture circuit. Almost entirely because Kirk convinced the system that having a secondary residence in the Orion system qualified him to claim dry-cleaning as a business expense. No one knew how he talked the Admiral into officially changing his job description to something that could get past the programming, but they didn't really want to. There had been yelling. And broken furniture. And, rumor had it, Spock punching Kirk in the throat, but no one really believed that. Not really.