Remembering a Rainy Day
I get Onedrive photo e-mails almost every day. I tend to open them up and connect with the memories.
The pic for this week was taken on January 11th a few years ago just before COVID hit. I was at work. The weekend was upcoming, but my staff and I would be at the office for long days both Saturday and Sunday. I was the director of the US tax department. Year-ends were brutal. Indeed, though I love the time of Christmas to New Year’s, it also carried with it a forbidding reminder of what was to come. My company required a “fast” close to the financials for year end. In theory, this meant we were done by January 5th or 6th. But there was never a year when that was functionally true. The Books would have a “soft” close but significant entries would continue to be made to the ledgers. Every day, we in Tax would have to recalculate our year-end provision and provide update tax entries (some years, we would skip this for a given day if the situation continued to evolve).
At the same time, the financials and tax work was subjected to internal review and audit to detect material errors. By January 10-11th, entries would continue to be made but they would have to be approved by the team in Europe. The auditors would get preliminary schedules and calculations, and sometimes they would zero on an issue that the internal review had not yet caught (always bad if the auditors were the ones to identify an issue though preferred over detecting problems when the Books were completely closed).
While this was going on, Tax had to prepare a tax memo for the auditors outlining organizational changes for the year, major events, changes to tax law pertinent to the company both at a federal and state level, tax summaries and analysis of deferred taxes, account reconciliations, current and deferred tax expense reconciliations, state summaries, and so on. As the ledgers changed, and the tax entries changed, the schedules in the memo changed and everything had to be updated on the quick. The days were long and stressful. People in the office were stretched thin, tempers could be short, and if significant errors were identified late in the game, everyone ran for cover. Assigning blame was a combination of political posturing and a genuine desire to improve the process to avoid or at least mitigate the problem in the future.
There was no let-up until the tax memo was signed-off by the auditors but even then, there were secondary deliverables that had to be turned around. I typically worked every day for the first 3 weeks of January, and in difficult years, the entire month. There was no let up, and I referred to it as the Deep Dive because I did little else but show up, work, go home and collapse and by the time it was over I had lost an entire month—it felt surreal.
I have a vague memory of taking the blog’s pic, seeing the rainbow, and feeling wistful and sad that I was stuck in the office building another year, under immense pressure that would continue for several days. I wanted to ride that rainbow. I wanted to experience color in my life.
Yesterday was a gorgeous day in Houston, cool and sunny, and instead of being tethered to my computer, under strain, under the gun, I ventured to the gym and gardened and spent time working on book2 edits, in short, having a lovely day. I had the kind of day that I wished I could have on that rainy day in the office when I looked out the window and wondered if life could be something else. And I am most grateful.
