Doom appears to have missed me, which is really rather careless of it. Perhaps it decided I had already had my fair share of bad luck this year, and it was someone else’s turn.

In other words, I am now

Radio Clare ACA

No one can possibly be more surprised by this turn of events than I am. Accountancy results traditionally come out at 5pm on a Friday evening, which causes a day of nervous torture for those who await them, but is regarded as the most economically sensible time for exams results to be released by employers. After all, most trainees who fail such exams are instantaneously dismissed from their jobs, which not only causes a certain amount of personal distress to them, depending on how passionately they wanted to be a chartered accountant, but also leaves a gaping hole in the schedules of those people who have sacked them, who had had them timetabled to do all manner of highly necessary and equally disagreeable jobs for the next six months or so. If you are going to be put to the not inconsiderable inconvenience of losing a member of staff, you may as well ensure you get a good week’s work out of them first before you impart the bad news.

The results arrive by text message, which is the Institute of Chartered Accountant’s way of telling you it is a cool and happening organisation. They are also emailed to you and published on the web, so the idea is that wherever you are you should be able to access them. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, with texts arriving up to an hour late and the website being unable to cope with the uncharacteristically high level of traffic.

On Friday, I had a dilemma. On previous occasions when I have received exam results, I have been by myself. This is the way I would much prefer to receive them. I get incredibly nervous beforehand, so much so that I couldn’t bring myself to retrieve my degree results until the best part of twenty four hours after they were published, and having other people there watching me receive my results adds a new pressure. On this occasion in particular, I was fairly certain I had failed at least one of the papers, and so I figured I would need time on my own to compose myself between hearing the bad news and meeting with my HR department.

My luck was not in, however, because for once I was actually working in the office. I tried asking the manager I was working for if I could leave early, and she said no I could not. I contemplated just leaving early anyway, but as the afternoon progressed, I was overtaken by a fatalistic sort of feeling and decided there was no point. After all, if I was going to fail, which I was sure I was, I needed to be in the office anyway to deal with what was coming, and so if I left I would just have to return ten minutes later. Plus, the text messages as I have noted are notoriously slow to arrive, and my colleagues in the office would have the benefit of the internet, meaning they would probably find out my results before me and possibly even sack me before I knew what was going on. I had a horrible cold, the sort which makes you feel a bit numb to reality, and this seemed to give me the extra bit of false courage I needed to convince me to stay.

I was cheered by the fact that the office was half-empty and very few people seemed to be aware that the results were coming out. Nevertheless, as five pm approached I started getting more and more terrified. I was desperately trying to stop the world spinning around me while I tried to complete all the tasks I wanted to finish if this was going to be my last afternoon in the office. I put all the files I was working on neatly back in the filing system as opposed to leaving them piled on random desks as is my wont, I emailed all the people I’d been working for recently, updating them on my progress and forwarding them any useful documents which I had on my machine and they didn’t, I copied any personal files on my machine onto my memory disk and wiped things I didn’t want the IT department to see from my hard drive in preparation for giving back my computer, I made sure I had a note of all the phone numbers of people I might want to stay in touch with…

It was strangely mournful

Then at two minutes to five, when I was sitting poised in front of my monitor pressing refresh again and again in the vain hope that the results might appear early, a partner emerged from her office and demanded that the entire department go downstairs to attend a presentation for someone who was leaving. I was torn; what to do? On the one hand, I wanted more than anything to stay here with the computer, but on the other hand doing so would draw attention towards myself, with the possible result that the entire department would stand and wait for me to get my results before going downstairs, and that was something I was anxious to avoid. Besides, I genuinely like the guy who was leaving so it seemed somewhat mean not to see him off. Thus trotted off downstairs, like the obedient little sheep that I am.

The leaving speech was mercifully short and it was probably only a few minutes before I was able to race back upstairs. Two things then happened at once; my boyfriend called me and my confirmation email from the Institute appeared in my inbox. I cannot describe the conversation I had with my boyfriend, for the simple reason that I have next to no recollection of it, but I began to develop the impression he thought I had passed. At some simultaneous point, I opened the email, and that seemed to think I had passed too. People started to congratulate me, and the partner came over with a glass of water and asked if I was going to faint.

Now, several days later, the news is just about beginning to sink in. I need to complete another eight months work experience, but I am in essence now an accountant. Wow. It’s not that I have ever had a burning desire to be an accountant, but there were strong personal reasons why I had done little work for these exams and hence did not expect (deserve?) to pass them, and the fact that despite everything I appear to have done so makes me indescribably happy and almost a little proud

The near perfect euphoria of my weekend has, however, been tragically marred by the fact that Rhydian did not win the X factor :cry:

Tags: ACA, accountant, exams, shock

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 16th, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.