x= death, pestilence and famine

True confession time, internet. I am an accountant. I am an Accounting Manager. Here is my confession: I suck at math. No, really. There are several solid facts to back this up.

• I almost failed first grade because I could not grasp addition and subtraction.
• Multiplication tables brought me to my knees in third grade.
• I still don’t “get” division, in the sense that if you tell me to divide 2 into 4, I will enter 4/2 into my calculator, figure it doesn’t look right and then do 2/4.
• I never should have passed Algebra I in high school. I had a first year teacher, whom I charmed and baked for. He gave me a 70. By my own calculations (ha! ha!), I should have had a 23.
• When I started college, I aced all but one of my entrance exams. Yep, Algebra. They will let me retake the Algebra entrance exam whenever I want, but if I don’t, I have approximately 42 remedial classes to take before I even get to college algebra.
• Everyone who works at Waffle House must pass a basic competency test. I waited tables there the summer before my senior year (all my friends were doing it- it was a great summer). I cheated on the sales tax portion of the math test. The guy sitting next to me fed me the answers.

Okay, internet? Are we seeing this now?

I can only figure that I have come to love accounting and have actual talent and skill for it because accounting is not math. It’s money. Sure, there’s some math in there, but I have a 10 key and Excel, and in the end, it’s all about the money. This truly is my calling, and I have been told that by several people in the field.

So you can imagine how horrified I was last night, when in the middle of my Managerial Accounting class, I came across a problem that puzzled me. We were given direct materials cost, total manufacturing cost, and the predetermined rate of overhead (as based on labor). So I subtract the material cost from the total, and that leaves me with the sum of labor and overhead, and I know that overhead is 85% of labor. So I figured the problem by simplifying the numbers- if labor was 100, then oh would be 85, and the sum would be 185, and 85 is 45.945945945% of 185, so if I take the 45.95% of the real number, that’s my oh and the remainder is my labor. You’re welcome for the glimpse into my twisted mind, there.

As luck would have it, the teacher called on me to help her solve the problem. I explained how I got the right answer. She was speechless and my classmates turned around in their chairs to stare at me, dumbfounded. EM regained her composure and praised my intuitiveness and um, creativity, and then put this monstrosity on the board.

149,000 = x + x(.85)

I resisted the urge to puke on my desk, or run screaming from the room. I only asked a simple question. “This is the only algebra we’ll do, right? It’s just a fluke, right, some silly exercise put in the text to throw us a curveball, huh?”

She then informed me that no, the rest of the class is chock full of algebra, and that she will require us to use proper algebraic formulas to solve those problems, regardless of how well our anti-algebra method works.

Am fucked.

I do realize that there are two ways this could go.

It is possible that I have had a mental block against math my whole life, and that somehow I escaped it with accounting, maybe because I learned on the fly instead of in a classroom. It is possible that I will be able to back into understanding Algebra by using it in a context that I am extremely comfortable and familiar with. It is quite possible that the Math PhD that sits next to me in class and the Math professor that works part time in our office and various other Math-y people in my vicinity will be able to help me grasp it. I could come out of this with a thorough understanding of basic Algebra, take that entrance exam in the fall, take College Algebra and then Calculus before heading off to my chosen 4 year university (where I would surely get my ass kicked in any math I dared take).

Or,

I could flunk this class because I’m a dumbass who has somehow faked her way into running a multi-million dollar company’s accounting department without knowing basic high school Algebra, for Chrissakes, and they could shit-can me, and I would end up waiting tables at Ruby Tuesdays and living under an interstate overpass, with nothing but my shame to keep me warm at night.

Am fucked.