LJI S11 Wk01 - Resolution
Math was always my worst subject.
I took as few math classes in school as I could get away with, and avoided science too for good measure. Science had formulas, right? That sounded pretty math-like. Ugh. I made myself a solemn promise that I'd have a career in the arts, as a novelist or actor, or become a social worker and help people.
In college I majored in Psychology. Psych was about people-I liked trying to understand how they think and why they do what they do. That was interesting stuff! There was just one pesky math class to get through-statistics. I fudged my way through that with a B or a C and breathed a sigh of relief-I was finished with math forever!
I worked in group homes for the next ten years, until through a conflagration of events (which can be best summarized using phrases like "issues with authority," and "lack of self-preservation skills") I found myself on the job market. But I was disillusioned with my former career and had no idea what to do instead.
I didn't have to work right away; my girlfriend at the time was more than happy to have me at home playing wifey, keeping house and having dinner on the table every night when she returned home from slinging airline baggage for what seemed to me at the time to be an obscenely high salary of $40,000 per year. But being home all day irked me. The role of wifey-depending on someone else to support me-irked me more. The need to find The Next Thing was never far from my mind, and one day I saw a sign in a storefront window: Learn To Prepare Taxes!
I immediately wanted to do it. The argument inside my head went something like this:
Me: Yeah! Let's do it! I can totally do that!
Also Me: Are you crazy? It's all about numbers-money. MATH! We don't do math. You PROMISED!
But I was following a hunch-a nagging, nudging feeling in my gut that said I was supposed to do this. So I did. I took the class and passed with flying colors, even getting the highest score on the final exam (which, back in the dark ages, involved completing a 1040 return with every possible attachment...all by hand, on paper forms. No Turbo Tax-style, step-by-step computer questionnaire back then!). After working with that company for two seasons I was offered the chance to run the classes they offered, and I discovered that the only thing more fun than preparing complicated tax returns was teaching a dozen newbies how to do so.
Jump forward a few years. I've left the tax company for greener pastures, watched those pastures turn brown, opened a business which failed spectacularly and left me in debt up to my eyeballs (a story for another day!), and was starting over once again, this time as a clerk in the admissions office of the local university's School of Nursing. As the low kid on the totem pole I was given the jobs nobody else wanted to do - and when they found out I used to run a tax office, the department accounting was gleefully transferred to my desk.
In retrospect the three small accounts were perfectly simple, but since the system was new to me I had to do some detective work to figure out where to get the monthly reports, and how to read them. I milked those tiny tasks for all they were worth, eventually giving them a starring role on the resume that won me a job as a Business Services Coordinator for a small southern studies research hub across campus. The first day I saw the list of accounts I would be responsible for - twenty-five of them! - and the mind-bogglingly complex Excel spreadsheet system someone had created to track transactions and balances, I thought I was in way over my head.
I wasn't. Not only did I manage those accounts, but after a year I leveraged my understanding of those formula-filled spreadsheets into a position as the lead accountant in one of the largest departments on campus. That department's been my second home for nearly eight years now. And you know what they call me?
The numbers lady.
Some promises are made to be broken.