Job Description Draft: Accountant

 Job Description: Accountant (DRAFT)

I’m a spoiled kid. Before turning eighteen, I had already traveled more of the world and dined at more award-winning restaurants than most people would in their lifetime. When I asked my parents to attend USC, they happily agreed without even giving a second thought to the tuition. While I was well aware of my privilege, I never fully understood the value of a dollar bill.

During my first year at USC, I matured and better understood how much my parents did for me. Despite living in Los Angeles, where the cost of living is nearly three times Hanoi’s, my parents still allow me to live comfortably. To demonstrate my appreciation and maturity to my parents, I requested to work as an accountant in my family’s business.

According to Merriam-Webster, an accountant is responsible for “recording and summarizing business and financial transactions and analyzing, verifying, and reporting the results.” Just as the definition suggests, accounting is a tedious and monotonous job. But this experience was more than just accounting. It was my first job, so there were many things to learn besides the work itself.

So you can better understand my experience, I’ll describe three main responsibilities and challenges I had:

• Playing Where’s Waldo

• Traveling in a Foreign Country

• Cardio Training

Playing Where’s Waldo

One of my job tasks was reconciling bank statements of credit transactions–at least, that’s what is on my resume. Every morning, I had to review and verify 500 or so transactions on an Excel spreadsheet to ensure they were correctly recorded. Whenever I found an error, I was to highlight the cell in bright red; I was not to miss any error. While tedious, the task seemed simple enough when I received this assignment the first day I came into the office. “If I just checked each transaction line by line, this is no more than a labor-intensive, easy task. Where could I go wrong?” I thought.

Yet, by the start of the third week, I was already out of it. For the last two weeks, I had spent two to three hours every morning looking at hundreds of transactions. After looking at so many strings of nearly identical numbers, the numbers began to play tricks on my mind. When I stared at them, they twisted and distorted uncontrollably. Even when I closed my eyes, I could still see the numbers. It felt as though the numbers were revolting for being locked up in an Excel spreadsheet. And those pesky errors I was trying to find became incredibly difficult amidst this optical chaos. 

It reminded me of playing “Where’s Waldo” as a kid. Whenever I opened a “Where’s Waldo” book, I always began by diligently scanning the page from left to right, top to bottom, thinking that the systematic approach was correct. But half of the time I played, I couldn’t find Waldo before giving up. Staring at all the minute details in the illustration overwhelmed my eyes, making everyone and everything look like Waldo. “Is that a beach umbrella or Waldo?” I would repeatedly question. The errors on the spreadsheets were my Waldos.

Traveling in a Foreign Country

At USC, I get tremendous praise when I show off my Vietnamese to my international friends. “It’s so cool that you’re fluent in two languages!” they would rave. But in reality, even though I call Vietnam my home, my Vietnamese is at an eighth-grade level at best.

On the last day of my first week on the job, I mustered up the courage to ask some of my coworkers out to lunch. One of them was going to IU-Bloomington, so I thought we might even speak in English together. But when I sat down, they rained a series of interrogative questions and cultural references on me in Vietnamese. 

“Em đi học ở đâu? Em đã tình yêu tình báo chưa? Cuối tuận đi coi Sơn Tùng biểu diễn không?”

If you didn’t understand any of that and tried to plug it into Google Translate, you know how I felt then. Whenever I was asked a question, I would interpret it in English, formulate an answer in English, and then translate my response back into Vietnamese. A lot got lost in translation: at best, I could only understand 70% of what they were saying and say 50% of what I wanted to say in response. 

That lunch break was marked by an awkward number of giggles and pauses. At least my coworkers were friendly and didn’t mock me about it. From that day onwards, there was an unspoken rule in the office to treat me as if I was an American who had just come to Vietnam and was still learning the language and culture there.

Cardio Training

The stereotypical caricature of an accountant is someone stuck in their cubicle all day who stares at their computer all day. While I can’t deny that I spent a lot of time doing that, I must admit I got a lot more cardio exercise than I expected.

The Accounting office was located on the third floor of the office building. The other departments, like Finance and HR, were scattered throughout the building from floors one to five. Another responsibility I had on the job was collecting invoices from all other departments, bringing them back to the office, and manually recording them daily. I ran these errands after every lunch break.

The office building is large, but there were inconveniently few elevators to facilitate movement between floors. If I were to use them, I would have to wait for up to two minutes just for one to show up. The clever solution I had? Stairs. From 1:00 - 3:00 pm, I would spend most of that time climbing up and down the flights of stairs. By the end of the day, I was always profusely sweating and annoyed that I had another dress shirt to take to the dry cleaner. At least I ran off the calories I had for lunch, I guess. 

Passive Sentences: 9.8%

Flesch Reading Ease: 66.5

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 7.8