You know how they say things often happen in threes, well here goes….

My quintessential act of obliviousness and stupidity started innocently enough as a clueless college freshman seeking The Answer to The Question….“What should I be when I grow up?” My randomly assigned guidance counselor, despite knowing nothing about me except my name, felt my vast mathematical prowess (680 SAT) and equally poor science aptitude (barely passing 2 of 3 Regents), inadequately honed by three years in an all-male NYC specialized high school (a whole other story), was not an intriguing compilation of knowledge to consider becoming an engineer. Good point, but the true genius of her assessment was this mix of knowledge could be put to great use by becoming an accountant. This despite my prototypical hippie-esque persona….ripped clothing, shoulder-length hair, red-tinged, seemingly stoned-out eyes and lingual skills bordering on primitive (remember….three years, no girls…there was no pressing need for advanced conversing) would lead any semi-qualified individual to think another profession might ultimately be a better choice. Being a socially stunted seventeen-year-old totally consumed with real-world re-entry, I gave the matter nominal attention and thought, “She’s the professional, why not?” It seemed like a reasonable enough career choice, especially for someone with no fucking clue (me) or the criminally insane (maybe her), and thus I embarked on a four-year journey into the deepest recesses of man’s ability to punish another man. Accounting???? What. The. Fuck. The fallacy here was accounting was not really about numbers, but about a myriad of tedious rules and regulations governing how numbers were reported to anyone who actually gave a shit. Being strong in math was inconsequential, so perhaps I should have given it a little more thought and maybe done some research, but I didn’t.

Strike one.

Deathly boredom set in immediately, with the only salvation being I fell in with a crew of other unsuspecting, probably similarly-railroaded lost souls who were also sold a bad bill of goods, and we decided to muddle through it together by partying, cutting and praying we didn’t die a slow death in any of our courses, because that would have meant our intramural softball team, The Reserves For Encumbrances, a name we came up with while getting stoned right after one of our Government Accounting classes, which we thought was hysterical while stoned and simply stupid when we sobered up but was too late to change, would then be missing players, and recruiting other misfits with any athletic ability from our pathetic accounting program would prove difficult.  We were a tough crowd tightly bound together in communal misery and didn’t take well to newcomers. The terrible reality of this situation started to escalate during my sophomore year while taking one of my naps in Accounting Theory. I started hallucinating about how excruciating horrible my future was starting to look, but I didn’t have the guts to shift gears at that point without adding an extra year or two to my college career. I just wanted to get the fuck out and be done, with the strategic planning piece of my brain taking a back seat. The only other courses I truly enjoyed were from the Media & Communications curriculum but my risk aversion was in full control so I figured I’d just roll the dice and take my chances accounting might not be as bad in the real world as it was in school. And besides, unlike a lot of majors with no clear-cut direction, this had a clear direction, albeit one containing slow death as its endgame. But, on a positive note, I might actually be able to get a job when I graduate. This was a poor attempt at rationalization but it was all I had to hang on to at the time.

Strike two.

Perhaps I should have just hung myself, period, to save some time. The horribility quotient escalated and far surpassed the hallucination stage fears as the shit really hit the fan when all my fellow male accounting students came back from senior year Christmas break shorn of most of their hair and clean-shaven, and started periodically showing up in ill-fitting suits for campus interviews. A sporadic parade of robotic accountant/recruiters started visiting our third-tier college, probably mostly out of courtesy, trying to glean some talent from a motley collection of poorly educated and even more poorly motivated students. I had never met any accountants until then, and  any idea accounting in the real world would be better than in school was unequivocally crushed, eviscerated and demolished right to the point of making me ill. I was no doubt on the path to mess up my life. Needless to say my interviews did not go well, as I don’t think they were overly impressed by my still shoulder-length hair, poor and inconsequential lines of questioning, lack of interest and generally shitty attitude. One firm even went so far as to send me two rejection letters….I guess they wanted to make sure I didn’t show up at their office. I did have a couple of nice suits though, and they actually fit.

Graduation day came and I was about to join the real world, marching off campus appropriately enough to the theme from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, whom at that particular juncture of my life had an extraordinary influence on my thought processes and general persona. I didn’t consider myself unemployed just yet, but rather not yet employed….but whatever it was, I needed a job.         

After lying (and getting caught) and faking my way through a series of interviews, I landed with a small accounting firm. What a terrible job it was, auditing funeral homes while working with a one-eyed senior accountant who refused to clean both lenses of his glasses because he didn’t need to. That gig lasted five weeks and was followed by a six-month stint with another firm whose name partner was subsequently arrested and convicted of arson, the highlight being handing in my resignation to a Napoleonic-complex afflicted partner after he told me to cut my hair or else. Or else what? Or else I’d have to find another equally shitty job with even shittier people?  And then another small firm where I walked in on the owner and his biggest client, both in their 70s, with their pants down around their ankles comparing hernia scars. My mind was eroding with each stop but the journey continued with a couple of more jobs doing incredibly terrible, boring work with terrible, boring people. Then I finally cracked, telling my last boss to fuck off after he tried throwing me under the bus for his own mistake. Six years, six jobs, five resignations and one firing later….I came to the realization the jig was up.

So, you know how sometimes you do something and then do something else in an attempt to undo it and it just gets worse? Well, following in the footsteps of a good friend who transitioned from his similarly futile loser accounting career to the beckoning riches of the glamorous world of executive search, I dove headfirst figuring I had no other marketable skills and certainly nothing to lose. 

Strike three.

And I’m out….