Back from the South

I am back from Atlanta. It was a great break from the daily grind. It was my first chance to get away from work for a couple days if you don’t count recruiting trips, which were not necessarily vacation.

I have a few stories to pass along. I’ll start with the seminar and then talk about the fun stuff. The last requirement I had to meet in order to receive my FSA designation was a two-day professionalism and ethics seminar. Believe it or not, it is possible to “fail” this seminar. There is a page at the front of the seminar handbook detailing how a candidate can fail this seminar. Most of the rules pertain to tardiness or absences. You can only a combined 15 minutes of the entire seminar. Thankfully, there was a 15-minute refreshment break after each one-hour ethics case study. I am going to quote my favorite rule for the seminar (emphasis in italics added by me):

“The circumstances that could lead to a candidate failing are…

…4. Receiving more than one warning for:
a) Being disruptive in a session; or
b) Sleeping, being inattentive or doing other work during a session”

You can get caught sleeping once, but not twice!!! Needless to say, all 115 candidates passed. Apparently some people have failed in recent years for violating some of the rules.

Outside of ethics case studies and a professionalism lecture, we spent 2 hours watching ‘Billion Dollar Bubble’, a made for TV movie that was filmed in the 1970s about a major corporate fraud scandal that involved two actuaries at an insurance company during the late 60s and early 70s. Since the Society of Actuaries (SOA) is high class, they handed everyone a tub of popcorn as we walked into the meeting room to watch the movie. Nice touch.

The course ended with a fancy banquet and a “graduation ceremony” where the SOA president gave a speech to the new Fellows and handed each of us our FSA diplomas. To demonstrate how fancy this banquet was, check out the table setting:

I’d also post a picture of the SOA president handing me my diploma, but my dad does not know how to use a digital camera despite a pretty thorough tutorial. Instead, here is a picture I took of my diploma after the banquet:

This diploma ranks right up there with graduating from Michigan because of the effort required to grind through the exams. The banquet was preceded and followed with an open bar reception. I would have taken more advantage of the open bar if not for two reasons: 1) I had to wake up at 5:45AM to catch my flight and 2) I am fairly confident that my dad was drunk by the end of the banquet and he wouldn’t go back to the room until I was ready to leave. I wanted to get him back to the room before he made a scene or passed out, so I called it a night around 10:30. My dad doesn’t have a good liquor tolerance and he seemed to be ready to pass out once the banquet was over after drinking a glass of champagne and four glasses of wine over three hours. It was pretty funny, though he was embarrassing me in front of some work colleagues by telling stories about me. Oh well. It was fun. Here is a picture from the end of the night:

As for the rest of the trip, I traveled to Atlanta on Saturday morning. Since my dad lives a little over three hours from Atlanta, he drove in to town to be with me. I had not seen him in nearly a year, so I was glad that he decided to meet me in Atlanta. He also paid for my brother to fly in from California as my FSA present. I hadn’t seen my brother in six months. We had a fairly low-key weekend. It was a major pain trying to meet up with my family at the Atlanta airport. Neither my dad nor my brother have a cell phone. I thought I was the last person to join the modern world. Heck, ever RoopDogg has a cell phone now. Trying to meet in America’s busiest airport was not easy. However, I eventually found my brother and we were on our way.

All of us had been to Atlanta before, so there was not too much sightseeing to do. That was good because I hate sightseeing. The conference was located right by Emory College, so we were about 5-10 miles from downtown. Emory’s campus was absolutely beautiful. The part of the campus I walked through reminded me a lot of the Hill area on Michigan’s campus. We all brought our tennis rackets and played on Saturday night at some lighted courts near the hotel. I had never played tennis with my dad before. He’s lost about 30-40 pounds over the past couple years, so he wanted to join my brother and I on the court. He wasn’t very good, but I was happy to see him trying to be athletic since he was never able to play sports when I was growing up. However, my brother and I were unable to have our planned showdown with my dad joining us. That was a good thing since we were both quite rusty since we last played at the family reunion back in September.

We spent most of the day Sunday visiting a cousin that lives in Atlanta. It was a little weird being there with my dad since we were visiting a cousin on my mom’s side of the family, but it was not too bad. This cousin is the only other person in either family who is an actuary, so we had plenty to talk about! She is much older than me, and a partner at her consulting firm. My cousin always reminds me that I should let her know if I ever want to change jobs. Her daughter is only thirteen years old, but she is an awesome tennis player. My brother and I hit with her for a couple hours. Although I was still rusty, I don’t think I could beat her when I am on my game. Once she adds a good second serve and some additional mental toughness to her game, she could get a Division 1 tennis scholarship. A friend of mine that used to work at my company joined us for lunch at the tennis courts with his wife. They moved to Atlanta a few months ago from Connecticut and now he works for my cousin. It’s a small world. Here is a picture of my cousin, her daughter, and the happy UNC couple (they were stoked about the UNC win at Duke the night before):

Sunday night was pretty tame since we were tired from playing tennis for a few hours. Also, my dad, my brother, and I had bad sunburns since we neglected to put on sunscreen. It was sunny and 70 every day, which was a great change from the recent cold in CT.

After the seminar on Monday, I went with my dad, my brother, and someone from work to the Atlanta Thrashers hockey game. They were hosting the Florida Panthers. Given that hockey is not popular in the South, there were plenty of tickets. We were able to buy great seats on the club level behind one of the goals for $20 each. Face value was $60. The arena was only ½ full. The Thrashers ended up winning in a shootout. I am a hockey purist and I hate the shootout, but I have to admit that it was a fairly entertaining finish. I just never want to see shootouts in the playoffs. Ever. I didn’t bring my camera to the game, so I have no pictures. My favorite story from the game was this guy sitting around the 6th row behind the net. He wore a Thrashers jersey with the number ’99’ and the name “Rabid Fan” on the back. Every time there was a scuffle after the whistle in our end of the rink or a bad call/non-call by the ref, “Rabid Fan” would charge out of his seat to the front row and start banging on the glass. It was quite funny since he was several rows away from the glass. No one sitting in the front row seemed to care, so I assume that this guy has some sort of reputation as the rowdy guy in that section. They seemed to feed off him. I wish there were more crazy fans at the rink instead of ~9,000 empty seats, but it is hockey in the South.

One other rant to pass along before I bring this post to a merciful end. My dad has so many annoying/bad habits. I don’t even bother to point them out any more to him because he will never change and it’s not worth an argument. However, I just wish he would do the following three things:
1) Close the door when you are using the bathroom. We are family, but I don’t want to see you pee.
2) Learn table manners. Eating with your mouth full and using your hands at a fancy banquet are probably not appropriate.
3) Please don’t shout. I am standing next to you and I can hear you just fine. So can the person walking ½ mile ahead of us. It’s not like this is a new thing. He’s been doing this for decades.

That is all. I was still happy to spend time with him, so I should qualify the above rant.

I hope to have some good stories from this next weekend in a few days. I’ll put my weekend plans in a separate post.