“Why do you want to be a translator? You’ll get bored and regret leaving accountancy,” advised an ex-colleague of mine shortly before I prematurely left my Big-4 accountancy firm of choice.
“Why do you think? I hate accounting; doing any job whatsoever that isn’t accounting might help me regain the pieces of my soul that I assume have probably been lost forever. Most likely in Slough or Bracknell.”
“You say that now, but you’ll look back on working here fondly.”
I ran through what he could possibly be referring to when he said “look back fondly”. Could he have meant getting up at 6.30am to drive 55miles in the sleet to sit in a windowless room at a book warehouse on a trading estate in Swindon and then spend 9 excruciating hours speaking to moronic purchase ledger clerks, who I could have sworn I saw working as extras in The Office, asking them why they thought a copy of Jamie’s Kitchen was worth £5.31 rather than the regular £5.34 trade price?
Or perhaps he thought I’d miss making sure I arrived at a client’s office before any managers to ensure I could sit with my back was against a wall so I could spend 7 hours playing solitaire, buying things I didn’t want from Amazon and wondering how pornographic a website I could access before the website got blocked (for reference fhm.com is fine but nudecelebs.com falls foul of most firewalls)?
When I joined, I was promised a varied and challenging role, where no two days are the same. It turns out that indeed no two days were the same, but that was more down to society’s tendency to designate each day a specific name (e.g. Monday April 2nd 2007) rather than the type of work offered. The only challenging aspect to my job was a) being able to think of excuses why I couldn’t / wouldn’t work the unpaid overtime managers seemed keen to let you work, b) how to hide my contempt for every aspect of my job and c) how I could continue to make up numbers and pass them off as the actual numbers I had been given by a client.
I didn’t bother answering his question in the end – I just put my head down and got on with inventing the prior year’s sales figures. After all, it had to be done quickly; my car was due its 4th MOT of the year at 4pm and I wouldn’t be in until midday the day after – I absolutely had to go to the doctors to pick up a prescription for some Strepsils.
Monday, 2 April 2007
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