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Well, my job as a tax accountant continues to depress the shit out of me and I want to complain about it. Still burned out, still exhausted, the works. Can't bring myself to concentrate or focus on anything for a particularly long period of time. Pretty sure I'm making more mistakes and taking longer than I otherwise would.
During the month I had to rescue a client running a failing business who couldn't pay some of their accumulated tax debts and had a history of defaults on their monthly payment plans meant to pay off that debt, last time I called the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) they had previously denied the client another payment plan leaving them effectively stranded with no feasible way to pay off the debt in short order. The tax office contacted us regarding possible legal action during the month and I had to handle the negotiations with the ATO, eventually I got them to establish a new payment plan for the client and even managed to negotiate a fairly low monthly payment instalment.
How do you bargain with the tax office when they hold all the cards? The answer is that you don't have to; you only have to bargain with the tax office representative on the other end of the phone. I called to negotiate a payment plan at 4:00 PM, they picked up at 4:20 PM, and at that point they were very intent on handling my call and not stretching the entire affair beyond close of business. I had some other strategies up my sleeve to deploy if necessary, for example if they pushed back I was gonna say “sorry let me retrieve that for you” every time they asked for info, and then leave them in silence for 5 minutes so I could prolong the call way beyond 5:00 PM. But they agreed to my terms much more willingly than I was expecting.
In my firm we have a monthly wrap-up presentation where we can nominate people who performed well during the month for a token firm award. Guess how many nominations I got for establishing a payment plan for the firm's single most debt-riddled client? Zero. It's not a very serious thing, the "award" offers no material benefits, but it would be nice to have any kind of reminder that my efforts were appreciated every now and then. Welp, just a signal to try even less hard next time.
Right now I've got a trip to Vietnam planned in the second half of April. This is the only thing I'm looking forward to at the moment.
Thanks for complaining. I am exposed to way too any influencers and beautiful people online having the time of their lives getting paid to take photos of themselves, spend money, and be hot. Granted much of this is as fake as the porn industry, but it's hard to remember than when you're sitting in a cubicle working on Excel spreadsheets.
I am an engineering manager working for a renewable energy construction company and I have utter dread every time I go into the office. COVID was actually a godsend for me as it changed my working pattern from being 8AM to 5PM every day in office (with a horrendous commute) to 2 or three days in the office per week and no one checking what time I show up. It is so much more tolerable being able to work from home the majority of the time. But those days in the office, I experience so much anxiety and negative feelings it's almost physically painful. It's not so much that I dislike the work (though I do), but the fact I'm held in that office with boring-ass engineers sitting behind a computer all day long. Even typing this out increases my heart rate.
Anyway, you have my solidarity.
I'm one of those boring ass engineers (also in infra) sitting behind a computer all day, but I've come to quite like my job, and I think I'd honestly rather do this than be most of those influencers.
Their lives look pretty hellish, waking up every morning to perform hedonism for an invisible audience. They have no community, no source of meaning. I think I'd go insane about a month after the hedonic treadmill kicked in. Compare that to my job which is interesting enough and very concretely useful to my society. To be fair, I think I'd go crazy doing one of those ultra-abstract tech gigs or OP's accounting job, and it helps I get to go commission the stuff I designed in the field every few months, so I'm not always in the office.
There are definitely people with better lives than mine, but I'm mostly glad they exist and look up to them as inspirations. They tend to also be clearly smarter and harder-working than me. Part of me is glad I'm in the middle of the hierarchy; it seems lonely at the top.
Maybe this is all cope, but it gets me up in the morning. I'm glad you could ditch the commute and I hope your job gets better.
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