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.