Jack of Many Trades

Old Communist Yells At Cloud

Originally posted: 2023-07-05

I am once again enrolled in a community college Accounting program because the alternative was probably having to restart repayment on my student loans this year. And also because it'd be nice to have the paperwork if I'm going to open a little virtual assistant/bookkeeper gig like I keep talking about. So this summer I'm taking Business 101 (dull) and Human Resources in Business (horrifying but exactly like how you'd expect it to be).

Highlights so far have included: responding to a clickbait youtube video about Apple's "employee perks" and what they say about their work culture. (No list that includes in-office beer parties is going to say something flattering about work culture.) At least I was not the only person in the class that criticized the implied "spend all your time and energy on work" theme connecting the benefits that were discussed.

We also have to do a bunch of self-assessments and discuss whether we think they're accurate, but only about work, which results in me sounding even more like an alien robot than I usually do because I am discussing the features of my Carefully Programmed Work Persona(TM) and not, you know, a personality. So far my professor has not objected to this description of myself, probably because I'm meeting the minimum requirements of "actually reading and following directions" which I know from experience is always a crapshoot in online community college classes.

Also I'm not sure how Moodle manages to be worse every couple of years when I encounter it but my god I hate this software so much. Almost as much as I hate having to pay for digital access to textbooks because some of my homework is done via the textbook site instead of via Moodle. On the upside, I've also got other classmates who complained about that too, which says this may actually be a vaguely entertaining semester.

I don't know that my ethics score says anything about me as a person, however, so much as it reflects the fact that I work in a well-regulated financial industry (banking) and have never been in a position where I've had the opportunity to act against those regulations. I do think it's more harmful than helpful to weigh "socializing at work" and "filing false legal documents" equally when determining an ethics score, even if the point of the exercise is just to help us reflect on our own experiences and perception of society around us. Nuance is an important part of ethics once you move beyond simple black-and-white scenarios such as "stealing money from people is bad" and on to "when is it ethical to charge a fee as a consequence for a mistake?" and I feel like reducing all choices to a pro-capitalist right-wrong makes it easier for people to justify the more serious ethics breeches.