Saturday, July 29, 2006
Notes from the Sensory Deprivation Tank
I spent the past two days in a small, windowless room staring at powerpoints created to demonstrate to attorneys the wonders of accounting. Aside from a couple of five-minute pee breaks and an hour at lunch, I was fully committed to the world of profit and loss sheets, amortization, and bad jokes about Enron. I watched people do math for twenty minutes at a time. I listened to amazing stories about missing footnotes and discount rates that are off by one tenth of a percent. I got annual reports as souvenirs. It was possibly the most compelling two days in the history of human lives.
We did decide that the two organizers of the class were having a torrid affair, which was kind of fun. They kept stealing these lingering glances over the podium and making all kinds of awkward jokes about one another. They even had pictures of each other dropped into their powerpoints. Things took a little bit of an awkward turn when the gentleman offhandedly mentioned his children during his presentation, but I will always imagine our wonderful organizers discussing Enron over breakfast in bed, or perhaps in the shower.
Other things that kept me going? The impressively lifelike drawings I did of the Accounting Standards Board, the passive-aggressive requests attendees made that people raise the volume of their voices, the man in the back row who kept going "hmmm" loudly during the presentations. It's almost too bad I've now graduated from accounting school.
I spent the past two days in a small, windowless room staring at powerpoints created to demonstrate to attorneys the wonders of accounting. Aside from a couple of five-minute pee breaks and an hour at lunch, I was fully committed to the world of profit and loss sheets, amortization, and bad jokes about Enron. I watched people do math for twenty minutes at a time. I listened to amazing stories about missing footnotes and discount rates that are off by one tenth of a percent. I got annual reports as souvenirs. It was possibly the most compelling two days in the history of human lives.
We did decide that the two organizers of the class were having a torrid affair, which was kind of fun. They kept stealing these lingering glances over the podium and making all kinds of awkward jokes about one another. They even had pictures of each other dropped into their powerpoints. Things took a little bit of an awkward turn when the gentleman offhandedly mentioned his children during his presentation, but I will always imagine our wonderful organizers discussing Enron over breakfast in bed, or perhaps in the shower.
Other things that kept me going? The impressively lifelike drawings I did of the Accounting Standards Board, the passive-aggressive requests attendees made that people raise the volume of their voices, the man in the back row who kept going "hmmm" loudly during the presentations. It's almost too bad I've now graduated from accounting school.
