Wedneday April 15, 2009

April 15th, a date that will forever be embedded in my mind. In the "First half of my life" as I call it, I worked for a C.P.A firm for 8 years. The firm was the first job I landed after attending a 2 year technical college for Computer Office Technology.

I was 28 years old and married with a beautiful 4 yr old little boy. It's amazing how much you can transform from one era of your life to another. What you believe in, what you think about, and what's important to you changes dramatically. Or at least for me it did.

So I got the job at the C.P.A. firm starting off as a typist/secretary. Honestly, in the first few weeks I hated it. I hated being away from my son, who had to go to Pre-K/daycare. I hated not knowing what I was doing and being left on my own to just figure it out, and I hated my boss and most of the people I worked with especially one little unfriendly/unhelpful accountant that was more worried about my salvation than helping me figure out the accounting software program that I was having trouble with.

One particularly hard day I got totally fed up with it all. I faked an incoming phone call to myself and told my boss that the school just called and my son was sick and I had to go pick him up. My whole intention was to never go back.

I left and went directly to the school to pick up my son who I missed miserably. When I walked in to pick him up he was playing happily at a table with some other kids. He had finally gotten use to his daily routine and was settled in to his new school.

The thoughts of taking him out of his comfort zone and starting the process of job hunting all over again just didn't sound reasonable anymore. For my son's sake, I bit the bullet and went back into the hell hole the next day, and the next, and the next, etc.

In the end I turned out to be the boss's pet. I don't know if it was because I self-taught myself the art of bookkeeping or if he liked my sense of rebellion against the little self-righteous accountant whom he did not really like all that much either.

Most likely it was because I was the only one there he could get to go to the liquor store on the sly for him. I didn't mind at all. I had nothing against buying liquor and it got me out of that dreary dark office into the sunshine for a little while.

At one point, I know all the employees thought I was his "whore". In reality the money they would catch him slipping into my hand was money to buy him something that would temporarily end his own emotional pain.

My boss liked to portray the image of being a nice Christian man and employed the like, but we all know we have a dark side to us that can become unleashed when put into the atmosphere of a more worldly type like myself. He used to call me an excitement addict. I would say that was a very good definition of myself during those days.

To this day, even 500 hundred miles away, his firm still does my personal income taxes for a very minute fee. He once told me, "You did your time". That's for sure!