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Want to become an Accountant? Yuck!

My reason to become an accountant was that I saw it as a way to get free education while getting paid.

When I got my undergraduate degree I figured that I could rest on my laurels and the world would beat a path to my door offering me fantastic jobs.

In actual fact the only job offers I got was as an insurance salesman on commission, as a salesman selling paper towels and as an articling student for one of the big eight accounting firms.

I snapped up the articling job.

What a grandiose mistake!

Fot the next 4 years I worked during the day, I worked overtime during tax preparation time, I went to school at night and studied every night for 4 years and went one month a year to summerschool.

During this one month you crammed in two more full accounting-related courses and wrote exams.

So over a period of 4 years you take 17 courses and then write something called the Uniform Final Examinations.Failure Rate over 50%.

So you pass. What now? At the time I was working as an auditor for the government. My work was extremely boring because the government was in the process of setting up a new state tax system taxing the actual value of companies.

However, I had my own personalized briefcase, a copy of the tax act , and a namestamp.

The job was sooo boring:

-You started at 9.30 AM and then counted the minutes to 10.30 AM which was coffee time. Coffee time took 20 minutes and woo anybody who took more than 20 minutes.

And then after Coffee you counted the minutes till lunch.

Because it was a government job you could calculate when and how much your next raise was going to be.

You could also calculate how much your pension was going to be. So most of our time was spent calculating how much we would be making

5 years from now and how much our pensions would be.

I quit after exactly one year because of the boredom.

The Director was so peed off because of my disloyalty in quitting him that after I told him he immediately barged into my cubicle and demanded I handed over my personalized briefcase and my signature stamp as well as the tax act.

I bought a small existing practice from a Jewish accountant who had become a millionaire selling land as a hobby and did not need his accounting practice any more.

So here I was,in my own practice, the token gentile surrounded by Jewish accountants having almost nothing but Jewish clients.

Well, I learned accounting in a hurry!

I never learned real accounting going to school, just theories, laws and statistical methods.

However, when somebody brings in a greasy paper bag with receipts and says:" can you do my returns for the last 4 years?

I am missing about 8 months worth of receipts." you learn accounting in a hurry.

Another client(a Cropduster) comes in and says: "I just split up with my wife and she is going to tell the tax department that I have not filed a return for the last 7 years. Can you do them before next Tuesday? I have no receipts."

Anyway, counting other people's money gets discouraging after a while.

I quit accounting and started pursuing other interests.

On the whole accounting for me has been a waste of time.