The time I fell asleep during a training session.
It was my first year out of uni, I’d started in chartered accounting (on the audit side) and it was about February, so I’d been going non stop full time since October, plus we had lectures two or three evenings a week and on Saturday mornings. I found it hard to keep going — although the standard practice was to muddle through during the academic year and use the study leave and ‘grinds’ (Irish term for intensive tutoring close to the exam dates), naturally most firms wanted their students to keep up with the studies through the year. To be frank, chartered accountancy is one of those careers that relies on stamina — you have to be able to take in an awful lot of numbers in quick succession and I had the skill to find those patterns while doing some other work, but not the staying power to comb through every last file in one of Ireland’s biggest telecom companies that my small firm had captured as a client.
So I ended up in my boss’s office being asked what time I got to bed the night before. I said 8pm, which was true (get in, get something to eat, try to watch a bit of TV and paint or whatever and then give up and go to bed). He accepted that answer — he was a good boss — but honestly I wasn’t surprised when they suggested that although I would do well in my exams, I probably wasn’t cut out for the long haul. I did a couple of months’ notice in their tax department, and working on more bite-size chunks of work was much easier on my body and mind. I actually enjoy that kind of task-based work because I can do the work, I just can’t cope with overwhelming projects.
The flip side was though that when I was actually demob happy with a holiday booked to my happy place coming up shortly after my last day, I sat a computer exam which was way, way too hard for me and that I had done absolutely no prep for but was designed to be taken again until you passed. That was the first time I realised I didn’t have to worry about failure and stayed as long as I needed to to ensure I wasn’t smuggling notes out to other students, then walked out and went home.
Later, after multiple failures at other jobs and a tentative ASD diagnosis (which explained a LOT), I actually went back later and got an accounting technician qualification, a bit less intense and designed for people who were going into frontline management accounting and tax prep. I was back in the UK living at home and I aced the theory exams (like, did them in about half the time expected and was at the railway station on the way home by the time the exam should have finished), but the practical exam, held in the town where I lived now, was more like ‘actually finding the place where you sit the exam is part of the test’, and filling out a standard VAT return was harder than I expected. We were expected to get 100% on that — because obviously you don’t want a bookkeeper who messes up something as vital as correct tax prep; my aunt could do it in her sleep (yeah, you’d probably have help and Google/Ecosia for assistance now but the point, I think, was to hammer home how vital it is to get things right first time because if a small biz gets hit with a tax penalty it could cripple them). The last question was something that was 50-50 and I could just about remember and I put down what I remembered.
And then got to the door of the mocked up office (again, practical test, simulated environment, actually not a bad idea!), looked inside the textbook, found out I’d decided on the wrong answer, and burst into tears of failure. Theory is one thing, but my struggle in my entire career after failing at just about everything I tried, the practice just didn’t work out. I cried the whole way back to my mum’s office half an hour away by train and she helped me see that I wasn’t actually a failure, just someone who needed to give it another go. She’s awesome about bolstering my confidence.
I ended up passing, though. The examiners looked at the totality of the work I’d done and gave me a short quiz virtually by email to check some other sums, and gave me the green light. Without experience I wouldn’t have got hired, but it turned out for the best in the end.
The course was actually pretty fun in other respects and I enjoyed the health and safety office skills part of it and wrote some really good coursework with the help of the H&S people at the school my mum was headmistress at. It convinced me that I was more interested in the ‘rules’ part of accounting than I was in the ‘numbers’ part, so I went on to look for a Masters in Law and am now, many years later having had an abortive attempt at a PhD, spent a decade on reception, finally safe in my job as a property management delivery admin where I’m doing good things with rules and regulations for our customers and, more importantly, the patients who use the clinics we manage. So even though I cringe hard when I go past that building in my home town, that miserable afternoon taught me a whole lot about where I actually wanted to go with my life and that you can’t learn without failing.
Stuff also went down today that could be mortifying if one of our customers saw it (think Google Maps and a change in their data that left me speechless at the audacity of some rather unauthorised building users at our flagship site) but luckily it’s not my mistake…