Happy Labor Day
To honor Labor Day, I decided to skimp on doing a robust blog. The holiday has always been (for me) a bit of a misfire. My corporate life started out in accounting and moved to tax. Accounting operated on a rigorous month-end closing schedule. At Anderson Greenwood, I was a cost accountant and produced between 80-180 entries per month. Whew! Working weekends was part of life, and any holiday near the end of the month was just another work day with less traffic. I used to joke that Labor Day meant you had to work extra hard. Crack the whips! I never got to take it off.
When I moved to Tax, it didn’t get any easier because at Dynegy and later at GDF Suez rebranded as ENGIE, we always filed a corporate extension; prior to a 2015 change, that meant September 15th so it was batten down the hatches time and we worked long hours every day under a lot of stress including of course Labor Day. The 2015 change pushed the corporate extension due date to October 15th while the partnership returns were moved to September 15; this made a lot of sense since corporate returns needed the K-1s from the partnerships. ENGIE is heavy with partnership compliance, and ironically that was a historic change that began in 2016 right after the switch to the tax due dates. Labor Day became the drop dead date to get the partnership compliance done with targeted completion dates running to the end of August. Getting it all done theoretically offered the chance for observing Labor Day, but the corporate return was by then on a short timer to allow the State team to do their work, and at ENGIE, the due date for budgets, including taxes, hit in September (this date moved around but generally the Tax Team was required to launch their budget process around the first week of September).
I’m not entirely sure but I don’t think I took a Labor Day off until the year my husband died, and that was driven by prolonged overwhelm. I pushed and pushed and pushed and then pushed more, and it was around that time that I began to entertain the idea of leaving corporate life. Something had to give— it was a choice between spreadsheets/meetings/e-mails/memos ect… but with a nice paycheck vs writing with no paycheck. Labor Day, a holiday I never got to enjoy, became the symbol for what I wanted most of my days to look like. My inner map shifted into awareness that I needed to change course, and urgently. As I do, I considered the situation for a few months, checked in with my financial advisors, and made both a reasoned and emotional decision to embrace the freedom outside the office in a tradeoff with financial wealth and security (my announcement did catch everyone by surprise in large part because I rarely brought my personal life into the office; no one there understood who I was).
And so I give thanks to a day that I managed to miss out on my entire working career but which in a year of loss and change became a point of rest from which I reimagined what life could look like. Happy Labor Day!
