>> Actually what I liked was the people.
You've got-- I got to meet a lot of people from around the world in different countries
from different backgrounds, interact with them, get to tell them a little bit about the U.S.,
and get to learn a little bit about their countries.
And that is a rewarding experience.
The work is hard, but being able to learn about all the different countries
that I never ever would have seen otherwise is just amazing, and I still have a number
of friends overseas that I stay in contact with, so it becomes a lifelong impact.
Well, the bigger challenges, the biggest challenge is the cultural difference,
and getting people to understand what their roles are.
They had rules for their accounting locally, and we had U.S. GAP rules,
and getting them to understand U.S. GAP rules and getting them to understand the need
for the reporting back to the U.S., because as a U.S. company owning a bunch
of non U.S. companies that non U.S. income had to be included in our accounting,
in our tax returns, and everything else.
And getting them to understand the cultural differences
and the reasons we need the information is probably the most challenging thing we had,
which is why I spend a lot of time overseas,
because a lot of these concepts are not well communicated strictly on the phone,
or strictly even on a video call.
You need to be face-to-face and see the actual full body language of people
to realize whether they're understanding,
or they're just nodding their heads saying yeah I understand, but they don't really understand.
So I spent a lot of time working individual and doing some trainings.
I did start out in 1998; I did a day-long training in Bangkok for U.S. tax principles
to some of our new folks, and I did that several times as well.