So Far, So Good by Lee D. Goldstein

Author:Lee D. Goldstein [Goldstein, Lee D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Living Alone

…getting a job and meeting a lovely girl…

My five years at UCLA were not hugely successful if you measure them as preparation for life’s work. The problem was with the type of counseling that was available at the time. After all, 1950 was still the infancy of wheelchair users attending colleges. Counseling then consisted of an administrator pointing out that wheelchair users should have a desk job (not always the truth). When I met my assigned advisor, she took one look at my wheelchair and recommended accounting as a perfect desk job. How could this respected woman, head of the counseling department, be wrong? But that was to be discovered much later. For now, I took her advice, and chose accounting.

The truth is that I would have enjoyed almost anything more than accounting. I’ve always disliked sitting and moving numbers around. It later occurred to me that accountants do most of their work after everyone else has done something creative to produce the numbers that accountants then massage into acceptable reporting formats. No offense please, but that’s why they’re facetiously called bean counters.

Five years of accounting droned on for me while I watched others across the campus quadrangle, singing their way to the music and art and English classes I never took. Too late. It was only after I graduated that I realized it had all been a huge mistake. It was then that I took UCLA’s battery of aptitude and interest tests. The tests lasted three days and dug into my heart of hearts. There was no way to fool them, or to introduce some bias carried in my mind from family or other preconceptions. Variations of the same questions were asked in so many ways that previous untruthful or biased answers were ferreted out by questions asked differently. The truth was unmasked. When it was all over, a computer printed out the 10 fields of activity for which I was most suited. After five dreadful years of sweating out a difficult major, accounting didn’t even appear on the list. Holding first place on the list was museum curator!

Years later, I opened a chain of stores that sold handmade items and artifacts from all over the world. It took me a decade after opening the stores to put the two incidents together. I had indeed become a type of museum curator, albeit a commercial one. In a sense, I ended up doing what I was best suited for, the work that my heart of hearts really wanted to do.

At least my accounting and business training at college helped me in some small way to establish and run the successful stores. So in the end, everything worked out, and the five years of school were not all in vain. At college, I wasn’t required to take physical education, so I used those empty units, along with some elective units, and utilized them for credits to obtain an additional degree in Industrial Relations. Even that second degree came in handy later in choosing employees and handling employment problems.

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