Yeah I know... Best title ever...
My job sucks ass. I work as an individual income tax field auditor for the South Carolina Department of Revenue and have done so for approximately 8 months now. It is both mind-numbing and mundane, repetitive and redundant. Our main objective is to both attempt to wrangle up people who are fraudulent with their tax returns and to "educate" citizens on how to do their taxes. I can't help but scoff at the second part of that statement as our way of "educating" the public is to slap low to medium income households with large bills that they are forced to pay within a very small time window before it goes to our collections department and things go to shit.
It's the same way the police department attempts to "educate" you on the law by giving you a large ticket.
Don't get me wrong, the job is not physically stressful in the least. Most of my time is spent filling out forms and sending letters and documenting every 15 minutes of my workday in three or four separate capacities. Neither is it mentally stressful either, as most of my time is spent doing repeating mundane tasks that could probably be automated by a computer system if our system wasn't still based on software from the 80's.
The emotional stress is the real killer. Having to deal with angry, passive agressive, and distraught people on an everyday basis makes my old job of waiting tables look like i was putting shoes on the feet of jubilant impoverished children. That might be a bit of a stretch (and a terrible simile) but the fact stands that for a generally good-natured caring human being as myself, this job is a nightmare.
Therefore, for the month of February, I've decided to start bettering my life in anyway possible. My first step was to begin balancing my checkbook to better control my monetary inflow and outflow using a combination of a simple Excel sheet and the internet miracle that is Dropbox. Second was to purchase a gym membership, although the gym that was supposed to open early in the month has postponed its grand opening until March, so that is still in progress.
I decided, as well, to identify things that I could become passionate about and try to focus on those things when I got home from work instead of planting my ass on the couch and attempting to detox from the day. Cooking is one of my main passions and I have since attempted to try creating new dishes and branching out of my culinary routine. My other passion is computers. Hardware, software, applications and gaming have always been points that I have been interested in, but because of my Financial Management background, I have no formal training.
I have been pushed lately by my girlfriend Julia (a fantastic designer and webpage developer), my old elementary school friend James (an IT frontman and debugger for Fluor Corp) and my old roommate Zach (a nerd) to follow this passion and see where it leads me. I've decided to write this blog in order to document my experiences as I attempt to transition to a new career, hopefully one where I can take my business background and integrate it into my love for computing.
My goal is to create a log of how and what I've learned and to document this transition from bumbling office worker into some thing a bit more modern. As of now I'm focused on learning HTML, jScript and PHP and using my photography and Photoshop/GIMP skills to learn a bit of design and hopefully a few programming languages. For you the reader, I hope it gives you a bit of insight on my life, inspire you to follow your passions, and to learn from my successes and (numerous) mistakes on taking on this transition.
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