Busy Season Withdrawal

Submitted to Company Newsletter

Let’s talk about something real. Withdrawal. It happens every year after busy season. The email floods slow down, the alarm clock goes off a little later, you actually see friends and family after work. It’s awkward, right? Before long your fingers start itching, you start checking your email late at night hoping someone sent you a request, and you ask your roommate to create some fictitious spreadsheets for you to audit.

It’s a condition known in the medical community as Busy Season Withdrawal (BSW or BS-dubs), which afflicts up to .04% of left handed accountants who live along the Topic of Cancer. Symptoms include a desire to pass around a menu and ask people for their take-out requests and a tendency call and confirm if people really did send you the fax they just sent you.

After suffering for maybe 5 minutes last year, I wrote a book called Letting Love Go: How to Deal with the End of Busy Season. In it, I outline various ways to deal with the disorder. Below are some key suggestions.

1. Mock audit. Remember when you had moot court in high school where you argued your stances on the juvenile justice system? Same thing. Get some members of your engagement team together and relive your glory days.
2. Carry a dummy 10-key. I had my first year cut off a square from her jacket and outline in white-out the keys of my 10-key. When I am out and start to miss busy season, I pull the rolled up dummy calculator out of my pocket and place it on the bar or restaurant table or subway seat next to me and start entering the data. It’s just a release to keep the fingers nimble during the off-season.
3. Consider switching hemispheres. I am not sure how this works, but I have a theory. Ms. Mathison taught me seasons and how the crazy world works. In her third grade class, I learned when it’s summer here, it’s winter in Zimbabwe. When it’s winter here, it’s summer in Tierra del Fuego. Assuming this holds constant, if it’s not busy season here, would it be busy season in Zimbabwe? Consider me applying for the transfer.

It’s a tough world out there, especially after busy season ends. Please let me know if you have further questions about BSW or if you are interested in purchasing a copy of the book Letting Love Go. I might be able to scrounge up a couple Xeroxed copies in my cousin’s car.