Before and After

For anyone who knows me well, they know that I love to look back at the past as often as I can. The past serves many purposes such as reminiscing about how seemingly cruel my Asian parents were, funny stories about my brothers, songs from the 90's that take me back to a certain time period (The Boy Is Mine takes me back to painting Warhammer with Vic in his room for some reason), or using it as a lesson for the future. In this case, I'm fortunate enough to have access to some of my thoughts (either incredibly deep or stupidly shallow) from as early as 7 years ago I think. So I thought this would be a good time to look at an old blog post I did just over 5 years ago and to treat it as a DVD commentary on my life back then. I will paste the blog that I am referring to below and add my comments or thoughts in square brackets.

The Work Blog

So I'm at work right now, and it suddenly occured to me "What's the best way to kill some time?" [if this were today, I would say FreeCell on my phone, but I think I was rocking the Treo back then]. Why work blogging of course! Hurray for lack of supervision.

It's funny because usually I'd feel guilty for doing something like this at work, but I feel I've done my share of workload here. [I wouldn't really feel guilty as much as I would be afraid of getting caught. Still I'm impressed that I was able to get a full blog out on a kiosk computer] And also these are the merits of not being on commission and not having to worry about selling something to every single person. [loved that wage position. Eat that commissions suckas!]

I've had quite the crazy morning. I was just talking to Sharisse [oh yeah... I remember her] last night about how I was going to goto bed early and then head out to the gym at 7 AM [come on now, who are you kidding?] for the first time in a while before work (which is normally at 9:15). Anyway, I ended up going to bed around 12:00 AM [this sounds about right], which is early for me, and I felt pretty good about my chances of dragging myself outta bed on time. That night I get a pretty good night's sleep [I sound like a fob here :( ], and once I wake up I take a quick look at the alarmclock to have it flash back "10:20 AM" to me [holy crap I sound like a REAL fob here!] I have a temporary freakout until I realize that my clock must be wrong and I must have somehow screwed up the time while turning my alarm off in my sleep, so I take a look at my cell phone and it shows "10:10 AM". It's kinda funny how this works because I'm semi freaking out at this point, and at the same time I know deep down that my managers barely ever realize anyone is missing in the store [to completely illustrate the lack of managers caring, I believe one time I didn't show up for the entire shift and no one even called me or pointed it out. I think I even blogged about this before!] So I call up my manager right away, and tell her that it's me, and she gives me the "What's up?" kind of answer that I was half expecting, which further confirms my suspicions that she had no idea anything was wrong to begin with. I just let her know that I slept passed my alarm [in hindsight, why did I even bother telling her? The reason really escapes me at this moment] and that I was on my way, and she just gives me this calm "OK" response. As I was mentioning earlier, there isn't much of a rush at the moment so I even consider getting in some extra sleep or even eating a full-course breakfast [now THAT sounds like the good old Dev that I know!]. Good old apathetic Futureshop.

So I'm about half way through my summer Intermediate Accounting course [don't waste your time pal]. At first I was told from a classmate last semester that it would be a good course to take during the summer seeing as I have 2 accounting courses under my belt as it is, making this course a breeze (supposedly). Well, this course ended up being a really huge wake-up call as to how much I DON'T know about accounting (my major), especially for a 3rd year accounting student.

[I believe this was at NAIT during the big Oilers playoff run to the cup. I remember being pissed off because we would miss every major game and would only get updates from someone who listened to the radio every so often for scores [you can tell this was long before data plans were popular]. Anyway the only thing that kept me interested was the cute blonde girl with the english accent who sat next to me. One time she got freaked out that she had lost her phone, when I asked her why it was such a big deal, she told me she had taken naked pictures of herself to send to her boyfriend... I have never looked for a cell phone so hard in my life.... to help her of course]

It's also excited me at the same time because we've been learning about the many different paths an accountant can take after school, let it be going for your specific accounting designation (adding 2 more years of school on top of my curriculum), or just plain finding a simple accounting receivable job. What's really got me excited is the news from a fellow classmate from my summer course that at the moment Revenue Canada is hiring tons of accounting students to be auditors for work experience. The beauty of this all is that you only need 4 specific accounting courses under your belt (2 of which I have already, and one that I'm taking at this very moment), and also the job pays $43 bucks an hour. [somehow I doubt that this information was very accurate. Even though the market was in a boom at that point, I'd like to think that the CRA would require their workers to have more than 4 courses of training. Of course I didn't take this into consideration since lots of money was mentioned and I enjoy moneys] So if I play my cards right, I could technically finish this summer course by mid june, [one of the rare accounting courses I did finish] register and finish the last accounting course I need for the job by fall semester, and be working there part time throughout the rest of my school career. [I don't think I ever pursued that job. Not sure why, maybe my hate for accounting had grown strong by then] I'll tell ya, it beats the hell outta being paid under 10 bucks an hour at Futureshop. [but at least the discount kicked ass!]