My Big Mistake at the Big Firm, Part One.

I’m trying to get some posts together so this won’t become one of those sad little blogs where you have two or three posts before the person loses interest. I hope to have at least seven or eight posts before that happens.

So…I majored in English and discovered this mainly prepared me for reading slightly better books during my lunch breaks at my blue collar job. I am not complaining. I was damned lucky to fall into the job I did, I was making good money and had good benefits.

But, although it wasn’t exactly ditch digging or coal mining, it was physical and not easy on me. The hours were bad, and the work conditions were stressful. I won’t say where it was, but let’s just say when I told new acquaintances where I worked, they would make a joke about me going berserk and shooting everyone. Anyway, I would sit in my car during my lunch break and wish that I’d done more with my education.

I went through big life changes a few years ago that caused me to leave that job and gave me the opportunity to go back to school. I knew that accountants were finding jobs due to post-Enron regulations and decided to go to graduate school in Accountancy. I generally did pretty well, and was lucky enough to do interviews at a time where I had 3.8 GPA. I interviewed with the various Big Firms, but only one showed any interest. I think the others decided that I did not bear enough resemblance to the profile of their typical hire. But yes, one of the Big Firms was interested and invited me to their office for a second round of interviews.

Long story short, they ended up hiring me, sort of. I had interviewed for an internship but they said no to that and ended up offering me a full-time job when I graduated. Looking back, and knowing more about how the firms operate, I should have known that their rejection of me as an intern should have indicated that I was not a “good fit” for them. But at the time, I viewed it as positive, that they liked me so much they did not even want to mess with an internship. These days, I know that this particular Big Firm liked to hire pretty much anyone who met their minimum standards, just so they could brag about hiring the most new grads in order to entice students to work there.

My decision to work there ended up being a Major Mistake, one of those ones that you kick yourself over and over for making. The type that you start whining and crying about when you get drunk. A country-music song type of mistake. And I will tell you more about it after I have a good think about what I should and should not write.