The Accidental Accountant

I have no credentials to do most of what I do at work. My educational background is English literature. Medieval English literature, to be more precise, along with a fairly firm grounding in Southern Literature and a smattering of Jewish literature.

I can also carry on intelligent conversations about the Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats), but that usually just degenerates into me insisting yet again that they all needed an editor.

Several editors, in fact.

Too, too many words. Meaning often gets lost in the verbal flatulence that the Romantics loved so well. I have no love for such florid writing.

Give me Emily Dickinson any day. Or Eudora Welty. John Donne. Thoreau. Anybody but those verbose, pompous Romantics.

Sometimes less is more. Actually, most of the time less is more.

But I digress. (At least I admit it.)

I work in finance and accounting for no reason I can see, except that it seems to fit me and the job was there.

I quite fell into the profession by accident and discovered I loved it.

I love the combination of ambiguity and preciseness that the job entails.

Contrary to what many people think, accounting demands many more judgment calls than those same people might be comfortable with. It’s more like an art than a science. And if they knew, they might be a little uncomfortable.

But it’s a mentally challenging job—sometimes more than I really want it to be. Especially on Mondays or the day after I've taken vacation time or the day after I just really had a bad day before.

I'm not complaining. I'm lucky to have a job that engages me on so many levels.

Of late, I’ve been stepping outside my credentials again, helping to put together a website with a bunch of people who don’t really understand how things like that work. Cleaning things up after the fact can be mess. But it can be done.

My world is small and big at the same time.

I’m not complaining. Life’s usually good if you let it be. Or at least tolerable.

So I’ll go on doing things that I have no credentials, but plenty of qualifications, to do. I’ll keep stepping out of the box and creating my professional life as I go along.

Learning on your own doesn’t come with credentials, other than personal integrity and a proven history.

And the day I stop learning new things will be the day I consider my life officially over.

It wouldn’t be much of a life, now would it?