There is no Accounting for my Taste

May 12th, 2016

Some Concepts are too Small for the Brain to Cope With

I have been studying accounting today, and here is my conclusion: if you have a choice between poverty and studying accounting, choose poverty.

It is astounding to me that anyone can stand this stuff for more than half an hour. They say dentists and lawyers have the highest suicide rates. How can that be, when there are accountants? Maybe accountants drop dead spontaneously from boredom, before the urge to commit suicide can come to fruition.

As readers who are up to date know, I had to take over my dad’s bookkeeping, and that means using Quickbooks. You can’t use Quickbooks if you have no idea what the little words in the windows mean. You have to know something about accounting.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I found a guy who runs a website that helps rental property owners use Quickbooks, but his PDF that “explains” accounting is pretty horrid. I had to find something super basic, so I went to Udemy.com and signed up for a free course. I found a nice old guy who explains accounting by drawing bad cartoons on a whiteboard. This is more my speed.

I’ve probably sat through twenty minutes of the course, and to my credit, I haven’t put a firearm in my mouth even once.

I have a B.S. in physics, plus some graduate school. That means I had no problem with advanced math. Unfortunately, accounting is all addition and subtraction, and it uses filthy ARABIC NUMBERS, not clean little variables. I hate addition and subtraction. They are the toilet-scrubbing of math. Keeping track of endless pluses and minuses drives me nuts. So tedious. It’s like digging your way out of the Chateau d’If with a teaspoon.

There isn’t one single interesting concept in this mess. It’s all first-grade math, combined with the hassle of keeping signs straight. If you have any kind of a brain at all, accounting is paralyzing. If the Nazis had captured Oppenheimer and Einstein, they could have used accounting to torture them into revealing nuclear secrets.

It reminds me of a story my dad told me. He was in the army, and he and some other men were sitting around. A sergeant showed up and asked if any of them were college graduates; he said they had a special task for educated people. My dad raised his hand, expecting to get a cushy job. He and the other graduates were led away and forced to unload a huge truck full of typewriters.

Love that blue collar humor.

All that being said, this will be a good experience for me (when it’s over), because everyone should understand basic accounting. It would have been nice if I had realized the importance of accounting when I was in college. I could have made my dad foot the bill for a couple of leisurely courses. Sadly, I didn’t realize it until I was older, and when I did, I learned as little about it as possible. Now I have about a week in which to catch up.

How do people stand it? It must be a mental illness, like the one that makes some men want to be wrestling coaches. “Now, Tommy, put your fingers under my butt cheek and pull forcefully.”

Over the last few days, I have experienced a sudden need for big fruity alcoholic drinks. That his how badly accounting has damaged my brain. While I’m studying this horrible stuff, I have to have a big fruity drink at the end of the day to unwind. It’s either that or go to a doc-in-the-box and get a prescription for Xanax.

I might as well post the recipe for the drink I invented yesterday. I am not recommending drunkenness to anyone, but one nice cocktail probably won’t kill you.

I started with my friend’s creation, the chupacabra. That’s Mountain Dew and light rum, with a lime slice. It’s much better than it sounds. I like it a lot, but I felt like it needed the tiki treatment, so I went to work. I still don’t have a name for the drink I came up with, but you won’t believe how good it is. You have to like girly drinks in order to enjoy it. If all you drink is straight bourbon mixed with kerosene and your own chest hairs, it won’t do a thing for you. If you aren’t ashamed to be seen holding a pina colada (while caught in the rain), you’ll like this drink.

Ingredients

1/2 shot pineapple juice
1/2 shot lime juice
1 shot (maybe a little more) Flor de Cana rum
2 teaspoons Coco Lopez
2 teaspoons grenadine
Ginger ale (Seagram’s, which has less sugar than most)

You start by dumping the Coco Lopez into a tall glass. Then add ice. Then mix the lime juice, pineapple juice, and rum and pour them in. Then add ginger ale to fill it up. Put the grenadine on top. I added four raspberries and a lime slice, too. Pineapple chunks would work.

This thing will blow your mind. It’s like chewing a whole roll of tropical fruit Lifesavers. When you’re done drinking it, you can scoop the bits of congealed Coco Lopez off the bottom and eat them along with the fruit.

I had two whole drinks yesterday. For me, that’s practically a binge. That’s how much I hate accounting.

It looks like I have a gift for inventing mixed drinks. I don’t plan to pursue it, but it definitely made this week less painful for me.

In two weeks, I will be either an accomplished accountant or a hopeless alcoholic. One way or the other, this ordeal will be over.

One Response to “There is no Accounting for my Taste”

  1. Ruth H Says:

    Sounds like a drink named Quicken to me.

    I had quicken once, back in the glory days of DOS, I think. I never used it, just had it cuz it was there. For some reason I’ve been getting a notice they are no longer going to update me. I haven’t had quicken on a computer I own during this century!