The first thing I remember is climbing up an extensive hike up through stairwells and a really large building. I was on the way to see Mr. Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary, at his place, which was at or near the top of this complex. I knew I had been there before, so this was effectively a second trip. I arrived in what seemed like a lazy weekend afternoon for Kevin; I don’t believe he was expecting me, as his place wasn’t all lit-up and company-ready, perfectly tidy, etc, and he was wearing more casual clothes rather than hist typical business suits. We seemed to only have a brief conversation, then I went back down. I arrived in a familiar area near the bottom of the complex, although I didn’t go exactly same the way I had gone up. I recognized the hallways, stairs and doorways where I was as being in the vicinity of the locker room, near the gym. As I was navigating my way through, I started recollecting the prior conversation with Kevin; basically his message was that he suggested I take a particular professional accounting accreditation exam, which he believed would be good for my job prospects, look good on my resume and give me more credibility with potential employers. I believed that to be true, but at the same time I had doubt about a career in professional accounting being stimulating and exciting enough to be happy doing on a day-to-day basis, as a day-job, and also wondered if that path had limited potential to be lucrative. Something I always want in a career is a performance element in the compensation package, so I can be rewarded exponentially more over the base salary for doing my best, having the opportunity to really shine. As I was having this conversation I went upward from the lower area, up to the second level in a large public space that reminded me of a college student union building.

Then there was a transition, and suddenly I arrived in a smaller office. I believe my dad was present, and a couple others but I’m not sure who. Suddenly a middle-aged woman appeared who had the results of my performance on a standardized exam I had taken. She opened the envelope with the results and immediately began prefacing, saying something like “You did really really well, like better than 90-something percent of everyone.” So I was pleased to hear that, but wanted to know more details about it. She fumbled with the paperwork, and I got a bit impatient, making a somewhat snappy request, “Can I just see it myself, please?!” I stood up, walked toward the door where I saw a small stack of about four exam booklets. I saw some diagrams and hand-written numbers on the cover, math-like calculation steps or measurements where I was making intermediate steps for certain questions. I then remembered one of the more interesting questions from the test where the problem was to calculate the area of a landmass by just being given details about the perimeter. This is a quintessential issue in cartography, because coastlines are fractals, so it’s impossible to precisely determine its length because the total length will be greatly affected by the size and number of the smallest measurements. So if a single straight line is drawn through a jagged edge, it will underestimate the length, and conversely, making smaller and smaller measurements for every little feature of the relief will cause the total length to approach infinity.

I went back to the table and learned that my score was a 7 out of 9. 9 was perfection, 8 was a single mistake, and 7 was just a few errors. I opened the booklet to get a better sense of my raw score, just wanting to know what I missed. Two questions had been marked wrong out of about 25-30 problems. I recognized some math stuff in other problems; there was one with a “-x” expression which indicated some algebraic manipulation, abstract logical deduction type stuff. O’Leary was looking through another booklet, and came across a problem he didn’t know how to solve. He turned to Bob Dylan for help, who was suddenly sitting at the table. Bob showed him quickly how to get the answer in two or three steps, which was obviously easy for him to do, as I assumed he was one of the guys who got a 9/9.

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