Test Day

Oh dear Lawrd it is test day. We have known about this test for over a week, and it was only (ONLY) two chapters long, so it should have been all good, right? Well. I don't know about how the weekend went for the rest of the class, but for me there was no less than fourteen, count them FOURTEEN different school related items on my to-do list, plus go shopping, plus get ready for Thanksgiving, plus a mountain of laundry and yadda, yadda, yadda. Yeah, I know, that has to all come into account when going to school, deal with it, pull up your big-girl panties and so on, but still, all those things do not add to the hours in a day, they take away from them, and something ends up getting the hind you-know-what and that happened to be the two chapters for the test. OH pooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooop. As I sat in the class just before it was time to take the actual test, I thought back to all the moments I had let slip by and essentially wasted instead of putting them to good use and studying. Idiots do that. High school kids do that. Adults are not supposed to do that. Adults learn from their childhood and put those lessons to good use so that problems like not studying are nipped in the bud and time is organized and put to good use and chapters are read and re-read and terms are memorized and pictures are analyzed and................oh poop twice. The test was Wednesday morning and Tuesday evening I am sitting in the kitchen with books and notes and the cat looking me in the face and the computer seductively calling my name, telling me there are some IMPORTANT messages on Twitter I should be looking at, and oh maybe if I get myself a snack I will be able to concentrate better and..... crap~ who am I kidding? I busted the weekend and should have studied and didn't. It is now Wednesday morning about a half hour before the test, I am calm, there really is no reason to be anything but.I made my decisions and now I just have to deal with the outcome. I scanned through the two chapters, trying to look like I knew everything there was to know about markets, analysis, shares, profits, customeers and so on, hoping that my poor tired brain would please absorb just a little more so that I would pass and not be a disgrace to the marketing world, and would eventually end up with a good job and not be left penniless out on the street with a cardboard box as my new home because I couldn't get a job to support myself and my cat, she is very high-maintainance and can only eat a certain kind of kibble and oh God I felt like I was going to fall apart into very small pieces on the cold unyielding floor and in comes the instructor. It is go time now friends and neighbors. To varying degrees everyone was reflecting what I was feeling, so I really felt like we were all united in our pain, so that gave me some comfort in knowing we were together in this battle, we were all fighting the same enemy and we would all either triumph or all go down in flames, but we would be together. We would go through this as a unit, together we stand, united we fall, you see the picture,I'm sure. Here we go. The paper is now infront of me, it is time to put the rubber to the road and actually look the thing over and start answering the questions. I read the first question and found I had actually lost the ability to comprehend the english language. I am not sure what language I was reading but it made absolutely no sense to me what so ever. I might as well just sign my name to the paper and be pleased with the half point I would get for doing that right; I checked; I did spell my name correctly. I blinked a couple of times and english slowly replaced the foreign words on the test paper and I actually started finding some questions I knew the answer to, so I kept going, hoping that the look on my face was one of intelligence but I was pretty sure it was like Goofy's look when he went down the ski slope. It didn't matter anyways, by that time I had finished the test and handed it in and sat in the chair feeling like the world's dummest old person who had no reason to be sitting in a chair beside all the young people who still had functioning braincells that had not been corrupted by old age and what ever else I could blame my impending test failure on. I knew there was no point in going on, I was destined to fail and would have to give my cat to someone who probably would not feed her the kind of food she was used to and where in hell would I get a cardboard box to fit me? My life was in ruins and there was no point in even bothering to try anymore and OH CRAP here comes the instructor back with our test results. Oh my freakin' hell I can tell just the way she singled me out with that look that I was the only one in the freakin' class that failed and God somebody shoot me now before I actually turn the marked test over and see..........................................................21/25. 21/25??? That seems to translate into 84%. I passed. Sweet niblets I passed. Frankly I don't understand what the problem was, I really didn't have any worries.........

Accounting, AKA, The Spawn of Satan

I will not ever profess that I have had any kind of love affair with numbers, as far as I am concerned they are basically kept on call for things like keeping pages of books straightened out and reminding me just how many kilometers I am going past the posted speed limit, and other than that I really have not got a whole lot of use for them. Don't get me wrong, I do understand their importance and value, it is just that I have never found any real romance with them, so numbers and I have basically gone about our merry ways...until now. Since being back in school and taking the business administration course, I have found that I can no longer route my way around anything number related as I am now in an accounting course. A good analogy would be a person with a fear of bees taking up bee keeping. I decided to be optimistic about the whole thing, I sucked at high school math, but that was the stuff that was, in my mind, meant to teach a person how to bend light years into fractals and chart the courses of stars and such. Make no sense? It never did to me either. I never got anywhere near high powered math, considering how bad I was with regular math, so being sent to school and being made to endure the tortures of quadratic formulas and sines and cosines and the like just gave me a natural fear and wariness of anything numeric, no matter what it was. I looked through the accounting books and decided they would not be my enemies, they would be my very best friends. I would cherish them, love them and absorb every ounce of wisdom they had to tell me and I would be one with the numeric world instead of shunning it as I had done in the past; yeah, right. It wasn't too bad in the beginning, there was a lot of reading, which was good, telling about single proprietorships and revenues and so on, all things I could deal with, they were describing numbers and so far we were still on track as being best buds. Then came the fateful day when we actually had to start doing charts and things like that, and numbers started showing up like wild tigers being let loose from their cages. At first things were good, I was able to deal with them, and then things started to get curly. All the theory that we had been reading about needed to be put in practice and we had to balance statements, and calculate equity and all the things that meant I could see my love affair with numbers quickly turning into a hate-filled relationship. Really~~ who actually does these things? Who really balances all these equations and keeps all these things straight in thier head, much less in a book somewhere? I know, accountants do this, people who apparently love to see their braincells bleed and burst from the sheer agony of keeping all these things straight, people who must love to see a new tax rule or accounting regulation come into being so they can back-dive into those numbers and make them all neat and tidy once again, people who apparently live a strange and rather sado-masochistic life, in my eyes anyways. This would all pass by my thoughts as I tried to balance numbers that, once again, would slip through my grasp and stand off far enough that they could laugh at me but not get cought. I hated them. I hated them with every fiber of my being. I was the one who wanted to be their friends. I was the one who was willing to open up my heart and offer them solace when things were getting too rough for them out in the real world but no~ they spurned me and set the stage for war. Questions in the workbook were assigned to us in class~ the numbers and I fought hard, each side taking hit upon hit, we would both retreat to lick our wounds and then we would go back to the battleground for another round, and it all culminated in the epic battle~~ our first accounting assignment that I had to do on my own and pass in. It seemed like I was going to die on the battleground with this one. I would start with the determination that I WOULD win. I would be victorious and pass this in with no problem, and then anarchy. I would inevitably make a mistake somewhere and the whole thing would go to hell in a hand basket and once again I would end up hating accounting, and calling it names I never even knew I knew. this went on for a whole weekend and still I never accomplished what I had set out to do. Problem was, I was maddeningly close. Close enough that I could almost smell victory. Almost. With a heavy heart I went to school on the day I had to turn in the assignment, still close to completion but with two tiny mistakes keeping me from my prize. God bless Lisa and Brenda, they helped me see where my mistake was and I finally finished it and with a sigh of exhaustion I gave the instructor the assignment; torn, bloody and nearly unrecognizable but still on her desk and out of my hands. A few days passed and the instructor gave us back the assignments. I hated to think about my mark. I knew it would be disasterous and I hated accounting all the more for it. Accounting was destroying my life and causing me no end of pain and heartache, not to mention an ulcer; for a fact. I looked down at the paper and saw...SHUT THE FRONT DOOR!!!!!!!!!!! !00% correct. I love accounting!! :) More later, keep it real friends, ♥Sue.