Brinens and Things

I am too tired to properly analyse which details of this are too sensitive to post here and which are not, so let me just say that I have an internship now.

(probably there should be exclamation points on that, but some events are too big for emotions. except anxiety. there's plenty of that.)

The QuickBooks official training course has a very deeply ingrained assumption that you're the owner of an accounting firm and are looking to have your firm start using QuickBooks with its clients.

(No, it's not *just* because that link is to the version of QuickBooks aimed at accounting firms and not the general one. The general one doesn't *have* a training course, just a few tutorial videos on individual topics. This is the closest there is.

Besides, that still doesn't explain why you're assumed to be the owner and not an employee.)

This...seems like it would be much less common than my use-case of "new graduate hoping that having some QuickBooks training under her belt will help her bootstrap into her first career-field job". Do people *often* end up *running accounting firms* while being entirely ignorant of how to use QuickBooks?

Well, I'm sure there's *some* useful information buried in here even as someone who doesn't much like the thought of *ever* running a firm herself. And I'll be able to truthfully *say* that I'm officially QuickBooks trained, which in practice is probably the most valuable thing the course gives you.

The maximum duration of a lease, in contrast, must be definite. It therefore is impossible to create a lease that would last “until the Maple Leafs next win the Cup.”³⁰

30. The maximum duration must be definite, but a tenancy may end earlier. Therefore, it would be possible to have a lease “for 999 years or until the Maple Leafs next win the Cup.” It is enough that the lease is certain to end within 999 years, even though there is a slim chance that it will end earlier.

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(I'm not sure if this would be *more* or *less* funny if I had any previous knowledge of the Maple Leafs' reputation.)

My grade in the managerial-accounting course has been officially finalised: A+. (97.5% on the exam!! \o/) Today the registration went through for my new course, on commercial law. The official start date is December 1st, but there's nothing stopping me from getting a head start on reading the textbook. I'm thinking November 19th: first schoolday after my birthday.

Commercial law is the last course I need for my certificate of accounting. Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be graduating sometime around March or April.

Entry-level accounting jobs aren't *as* plentiful as they were in 2019, and taking public transit is a somewhat more daunting proposition than it was. But there *is* still a pretty steady trickle on Indeed (mostly in-person: I suspect people are clinging harder to remote jobs), and I already placed a fair bit of weight on minimising the amount of time and transfers in my bus commute. And of course if the field is *really* barren, there's always the option of selecting a course off the associate's-degree (well, "advanced certificate") list, continuing my current lifestyle, and trying again next semester.

Speaking of which, yeah, it does kind of sting to know that at this rate I could've *already* had an advanced certificate if I'd gone straight for it. Seven of those uncounted-towards-the-certificate courses can be put towards an accounting bachelor's if I ever go that far, one wouldn't have counted towards a CS bachelor's either (I took remedial English to gain more confidence with essay-writing), but the other six are lost.

But there are a lot of positives here. I *did* figure out my calling, at the still fairly young age of ~24 (depending on where you draw the "figured out" line). It's a relatively rare career to be called to, which puts me at an advantage. I'm set to graduate with zero (0) dollars of student loans: I can skip over that *entire* bullshit and head straight to the accumulating-capital stage of my career.

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(Tangentially, I'm...a little concerned by how hard the university employees are working. My exam was graded one real-time day and *zero* business days after I took it: graded, in fact, on the night of *Halloween*. When I emailed the finance department asking for clarification on payment methods when paying partly with bursary funds, the autoresponse said it would take 3 - 5 business days for a response and a couple *hours* later they *called* me. Yesterday what looked to be a manually-written response told me my registration request (which needs to be processed manually because it involves a bursary) would be processed in 7 - 10 business days, and today I received the standard automated "welcome to your new course" email and the new course shows up in my list of active/recent/upcoming courses.)

I was too tired to do this last week, so here is a longer three-week post.


Comments on my own posts:

Another mind-blowing these-songs-are-by-the-same-person fact:

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Comments on other people's posts:

(This is from March 4th, but I overlooked it while making the previous roundups.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by archosaur-automaton) The adorable cover of this textbook is harder to appreciate when you've actually taken the course it's used for.

[mild cw: food, apocalypse] (This is from April 8th, but I overlooked it while making the previous roundups.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by 1rakus) A quiz with weird question weightings, and a digression on emergency power generation.

[arguably cw: aging] (This is from April 24th, but I overlooked it while making the previous roundup.) [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by thejogging) The many meanings of a half-broken key.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by sigmaleph) A short puzzle game about meeting password construction requirements.

[cw: amnesia] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by staff) Tumblr is ramping up its censorship, under the guise of "keeping hate speech in check".

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Fun with Project Gutenberg.

[cw: food] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by rustingbridges) Preference ranking of starches.

[Dreamwidth; Wayback] (OP by wolffyluna) Space-efficient email apps.

[cw: nsfw text, (mild) discourse] [Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by tototavros; also in response to shieldfoss and eightyonekilograms) Today in people getting separated by a common language (and not always geographically): how to distinguish between different types of plug. [three comments]

[Tumblr; Wayback] (OP by lavenderfables) I like Rincewind *because* of his cowardice, not in spite of it.

[cw: Pyrebound spoilers] [WordPress part 1; WordPress part 2; WordPress part 3; Wayback part 1; Wayback part 2; Wayback part 3] (OP by theredsheep) Pyrebound reactionblogging. (It's amazing! If you're okay with stories getting pretty dark sometimes, go read it!) [four comments]

(I noticed while archiving those that each section had exactly one previous crawl, manually requested, starting in July 2019 but continuing for the post written afterward. It's good to see that someone has taken the story under their wing.)

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Links:

[none suitable for this section]



There is a blanket [cw: illness] on the rest of this post.

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Tagged by rustingbridges.

[arguably cw: illness]

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I came across a thread a while back of people discussing whether one should go into accounting, and it dawned on me:

You *know* a field is a good fit for you when even the people who *hate* it make it sound good.

Paraphrased examples:


Person 1: "Oh god, it's *so* boring. You sit at an isolated little desk making debits and credits, and then *more* debits and *more* credits."


Me: That sounds peaceful. Cozy cubicle, lining up numbers neatly...


Person 2: "I'm at an entry-level accounting job, and one of my co-workers has been here for *twenty years*. They've never been promoted, never gotten a raise beyond cost-of-living!"


Me: So what you're saying is that accounting is *not* up-or-out. That--barring, perhaps, the particular kind of gruntwork you do getting automated away to nothing--you *can* stay a low-level grunt forever, if you want.

Dad complains about how after a decade or so at the company making specialised ebook readers (before generalised ebook readers were invented), they started pushing him to become a manager, even though he sucks at managing. And how he thinks a lot of the problem he's had finding another programming job is that hirers look at how old and experienced he is and go "you're overqualified for all the things you're actually good at, you're only worth considering for senior positions that you're terrible at". I would find it comforting to know that I'm not going to have that problem.


Person 3, in reply to Person 2: "Yeah, there's very little of climbing the accounting ladder *within* a company. The standard way to advance is by going and getting a higher-level job at a *different* company."


Me: So you rarely, if ever, have to have the dreaded pay-raise negotiation. You don't have to convince people they ought to be treating you better *than they already are*: you only have to convince new people to treat you well in the first place, and usually while you still have [the old job to go back to] and [other job listings to apply for] if the new one won't negotiate to your satisfaction.

(Also, this implies that "you can stay a low-level grunt forever if you want" generalises to all levels of the hierarchy: you can *also* choose to get one or two promotions and then stay a lower-mid-level accountant forever. Even better!)


Person 4: "Accounting is for people who want a steady income, and who in exchange are willing to give up following their passions. I'm not saying it's a *bad* choice, exactly, since we *do* have to live in this world and having a steady income *is* genuinely important, but...in a better world, I would be an artist like I wanted."


Me: That does suck for you, dude, and I'm sorry, but that being said: I get to eat my cake *and* have it?