Greatest Accomplishment
We’ve all had this question before, perhaps in a job interview (where I really can’t stand the question because I don’t think of the things I do at work as ‘accomplishments’, just part of my job).
I’ve heard people say that having kids was one of their greatest accomplishments. And to that I say, pffft. There is no accomplishment in having kids. Any woman in any third-world country can go into a field and squat, and, voila, there’s your accomplishment. That seems to me that it’s akin to having a good bowel movement – with a little pain and lots of pushing, something will eventually come out.
Maybe having kids and raising them to be great people or productive citizens or adults who are happy in their lives would be an accomplishment, so that answer I can understand. But the dropping of litter? biological function.
I never have a great answer for that question on job interviews. However, every time I’ve been asked it, the first thing that pops into my mind is, beating my mother on an exam.
Here’s how the story goes. My mother was going to retire. She wanted to take the real estate course and then open up her own real estate agency. She never thought much of my capabilities and, so, talked me into taking the course with her under the guise of me having a better job… as a real estate agent (working for her company).
So I took the course with her. Not that I had any interest in real estate, I didn’t, but I also figured it would give me even more education under my belt.
Came time for the final exam and she and I (and two others who took the course with us) went off to write a two-hour exam. I finished the exam and I was so quick I started going over all my answers because I figured I must have missed some. But I didn’t.
So I walked up to the front of the room and handed in my exam to the examiner – who gave me a dirty look, I guess because he figured I was some idiot who was flopping out on the test. And maybe because he wasn’t doing anything else but waiting for people to finish, he scored my exam right then. I got 98% on that exam in a half hour.
Well my mother finished the exam in an hour. Since she was also quick, she also got her results right away, and she got 96%. But she kept yakking about how she ‘read over all her questions twice’, to which I had to respond, “ya, so did I. I was done so fast I thought I must have missed some”. And I only let her know that so she’d shut the hell up with her excuse for taking twice as long as I did.
The whole accomplishment to me was that I’d beaten my mother’s score, and I’d done it in half the time. That may not seem like anything to you, but if you understood the way my mother spent her lifetime lording her Master’s degree over people (especially me), and the fact that she always thought she was so superior to others, you’d understand my absolute joy in beating her at anything scholarly.
So that’s my greatest accomplishment in my mind. I may have done other things that are more worthy in a worldly view, but whatever they may be, they will never seem so in my head.
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idiotonastick
Minna
Dave Barker
I used Moneris for over two years. I recently terminated due to a merchant compliance requiremen t – Moneris began...
Maria
just another
Female, taken, fire, Sagittarius, Monkey, Toronto, two kids, one grandson, IT.
55
is the new 30. I want the world to close their mouths when they’re eating or chewing gum. If they don’t, I want to elbow them in the face.
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