How did I Wind Up Here?

Really two major ways to look at that question.

How did I wind up in Blackshear, Georgia?

                            or

How did I wind up in accounting?

This blog post will focus on the latter question.

I love politics.  I love writing.  I love acting, and am pretty good at it, even relatively untrained.  So why am in accounting?

I am not very good at math, particularly algebra and calculus.  I took few courses in school.  I only received two grades less than a B in about six plus years of college.  One was a C in European History, where I disagreed with the political bent of a graduate assistant (and no, my conservative friends, she wasn't a right winger - she was a socialist) and an outright flunking of calculus.  So why am I in accounting?


My feelings of religious thought have led me to believe that making the world a better place to live is of primary importance.  Accounting is a necessity, for sure, but not always soul satisfying as far as impulses to improve the world.  So why am I in accounting?


Here are the only foreshadowings I had that I might wind up here -


***  I loved baseball, but I couldn't play.  I found the numbers fascinating that baseball generated, and found a board game that let me play simulated baseball games, and generate my own player statistics.  I joined a play-by-mail league, and participated in games with nerds from around the country.  The league was run by an Hispanic kid who lived in San Francisco and was a supporter of George Wallace.  Later, I earned my varsity sports jacket in high school by being the statistician for the baseball team.

***  I've only been published once in a national magazine.  It was the house publication of the Holiday Rambler Travel Trailer Club.  We were attending a national rally, and I was fascinated by how many states were represented.  There was a members book, that listed everybody who had registered for the club, including names and addresses.  I went through the book and reorganized by who came from what state.  Remember this was in the days before computers, and being able to quickly process information.  I wrote it up into a little article, ranking each state by it's number of participants, and the magazine agreed to publish it.  So my only published writing achievement has been a statistical analysis.

*** The only career advice I ever got on the college level was from a college professor (or maybe it was another grad assistant - University of Michigan sure has a lot of those) who thought I should become a political pollster/statistician.  Later at Berry college, I excelled at Business Statistics.  Yes, I wasn't fond of math beyond statistics, but for some reason, that I could do.

***At Berry College, I took Accounting as part of trying to get a business program.  It wasn't exciting, but for whatever reason, it was easy for me.  Certainly easier than computer science or calculus (which, have I mentioned? - I flunked).  One of the classes had as a final a complicated tax return to do.  The professor there told me that I was the first student to ever do the problem completely right.  To this day, I feel it was more dumb luck than skill, but there you go.

****The biggest reason, unfortunately, might have been "THE TALK WITH MYSELF".  I was not doing well trying to be a teacher.  I was not going to be rehired where I worked.  I went out that June, into my yard, and did yardwork, my mind spinning as I tried to think what to do next.  I remember thinking - I am a great actor, maybe one in a hundred - unfortunately, only one in thousand got to make a living out of it.  I was a good teacher, but at that time teaching jobs were tight, particularly in Social Studies (they mostly wanted athletic coaches...the first question in interviews was always - whatdaya coach?).  But this was the height of the Reagan revolution - financial stuff, computers, business - that's where the future was.  And I as a young father and husband, I had to think of that first and foremost.  So I surrendered what I wanted to do for what I needed to do.  I started Berry College, and began the course that led to accounting.


And now I'm here.  Almost thirty years in.  Its had it's pluses and minuses.

But the clock is crashing against me this morning, and I have to plunge into the accounting world again.

Sigh.

More another time.