The Great Flood and CPA Exam

The following is a short story of The Great Flood and my first CPA Exam test:

Trent had left in the morning on Wednesday for a conference in Topeka, so it was just Mattie and I at home until Friday afternoon. Everything was all normal, I studied on Wednesday night and Thursday morning and got ready for work Thursday and left around 7:50 (later than normal!). I worked through the morning and took off a little before noon to let Mattie out at lunch time. I did drive past the Jimmy Johns on 40^th St. to see if I could stop for a $1.00 sub during their customer appreciation day, but when I drove past and the line was out the door and down to the end of the building, I just kept right on going.

When I got home and was outside of our apartment, I could hear what sounded like running water. The first thought that ran through my head was that someone got into our apartment and turned on a shower to try to freak me out, but that would have had to have been a very loud shower for me to be able to hear it all of the way from outside our apartment… I opened the door and heard a swishing noise and looked down to see waves in the 2-3 inches of water that was in our apartment. I followed the noise that I was hearing to the bathroom and opened the door to see water rushing out of one of the pipes across the room. Seeing that there wasn’t really anything that I could do, I went back out to the living room and called for Mattie who had retreated to our bedroom which was the farthest away that she could get from the loud noise and the water and we left to go get some help. Within 10 minutes or so, maintenance was at our apartment and had the water stopped and got some shop vacs to start getting the water emptied out of our apartment. Absolutely every inch of our apartment was wet except for the very farthest corner of the apartment in our bedroom.  I went through and tried to get everything up off the floor that I could at that time and then eventually headed back to work. The maintenance guys got our bedroom as dry as possible but left the other two bedrooms the way they were for a company to come the next day to extract the carpets to get the rest of the water out.



This is the wall across from the toilet where the water was coming out.
It made a nice mark there.



One of our extra bedrooms with puddles on the carpet.
This room was right across the hall from the room that it all started in.



This is Mattie's food dish that had floated from the kitchen back towards our bedroom.



When I got home from work, I got everything else up off the floors and emptied out our closets and stacked everything on the beds or kitchen table or on the tile floors in the bathrooms and kitchen. It took about 3 and a half hours to get it all moved and to wash some towels and the bedding and things. After that, I finally set up camp in the living room to study since my room I usually study in still had puddles in the carpet and Mattie laid on the couch next to me. She was pretty worn out from all the excitement and trauma from the day.

Piles in the kitchen.

Stuff piled on our bed.

Bikes in the bathroom



The next day, I went to work in the morning and came home at noon to meet the guy that was coming to extract our carpets. He worked for about two hours when he finally said that there was no way he was going to get all of the water out of the carpet pads underneath the carpets and that it was probably all soaked up into the walls by that point. So, long story short, they ended up pulling out all of the pads from under the carpets and drilled holes about every four inches in all of the walls to try to dry out the walls. We packed up some stuff for the night and left to go to the model/show room on campus to stay there for the night. Our plan was to stay in that apartment on Friday night and then we would take off for Ankeny on Saturday after my test and stay with Trent’s parents for the night and then leave Mattie there since we were going to be staying in a hotel for Sunday and Monday nights and then hopefully be back in our apartment on Tuesday and start putting everything back together again.

Holes in the walls.



I spent Friday night studying as best I could and then tried to get to bed. I was so nervous starting at about 7:00 on Friday night. I knew the test was coming in the morning and there was nothing that I could do to stop it. It took me quite a while to actually fall asleep and then I woke up at least 3 or 4 times during the night. I’m not sure if it was because I was nervous or because we were sleeping on an air mattress in a strange apartment or because Mattie kept getting up and wandering around, but something kept waking me up, I'm sure it was a combination of it all. Finally, I got up around 5:40 and started getting ready for the day.

I went to our apartment to try to eat something and, at that point, I just had to laugh. This was really not how I imagined the night and the morning before my first CPA Exam test to go. Here I was standing amidst all the piles and boxes of stuff in our apartment eating a bowl of cereal that I had to reach over a bunch of our stuff in the kitchen to get to. I don’t know why I even tried to eat, I was so sick to my stomach and nervous, it was ridiculous.

I took off for the testing center around 6:45 and got there around 7:10. I sat in the car for 5 minutest trying to calm myself, but I finally decided that I’d better just go get this over with. I was the first tester of the day there, so the whole process went very smoothly. I showed them my ID and my Notice to Schedule, then they took my picture and my finger prints and I turned my pockets inside out and pulled up my sleeves and they waved me down with a metal detecting want and then after they were satisfied that I wasn’t trying to smuggle in some notes or had written things down on my hands, they sat me down at what would be my computer for the next 4 and a half hours.

The test wasn’t horrible, but I left there feeling not very confident about what I had just done. There were some questions that I knew that I absolutely got right but it seemed there were more that either I wasn’t sure at all on or that I had questions about, so that really makes me feel uneasy about the whole thing. I think I base my feeling off of all of the practice tests I’ve done. There were a lot of times that I would answer a set of questions in my study materials and think that I knew what I was doing and that I had them right and then the results would come back with a really bad score and I had been way off base on my answers or had forgotten one key piece of information. So I guess that I feel like that very well could happen here. Even the questions that I was fairly confident on may be totally wrong. But who knows…  I guess I will find out in a few weeks.

As for now, it is 87 days until my next test. February 9^th will be when I’m sitting for my Auditing and Attestation Exam. I’m taking a break from studying this week, just because I want/need a break for a bit and now since everything we own is stuffed into boxes and in piles, I might as well wait until things get figured out again.

An update on the apartment situation: We just found out this morning that the insulation in the outside walls didn’t dry over the weekend, so they are going to have to take the drywall off of the outside walls and replace the insulation and then fix it all again. This is on top of fixing all the holes in the interior walls and replacing the carpet pad in the carpeted rooms. They also told us that they want all of our stuff out of the apartment while they do this and that it could take about 3 weeks to get it all done, so we will be moving all of our stuff out today because it has to be out by 8 a.m. tomorrow.  I’m not sure where we’re moving our stuff to or where we’ll be staying during all of this, but we will soon find out, as Trent is meeting with his boss and the maintenance guy in a little while. So, we'll see what they say. J

I will post soon on what I'm thankful for, Day's 9 through 14! I've gotten a little behind.