The 'cruising' season has started!

WACC, ROIC, RONA, ROOA, EVA, COD and EBIT. If Accounting was a world of rules, then Finance is a world of abbreviations. Add 'Amortization of Goodwill' and 'Net Working Capital' and we have the same challenge as in Accounting: Figuring out what it all means. It is actually not that hard to understand the principles behind it. The math as such is very simple. It is more a matter of getting the terminology right and building vocabulary. More often than not, there is more than one term for the very same thing. And to complicate things a bit more, some of the terms have different meanings depending on whether you are in the world of accounting or the world of finance. If you were in doubt: The Finance exam starts tomorrow at 8.00!

Just like Kristin and probably many others I took yesterday afternoon off. I have had my motorbike standing in the basement since I arrived in Lausanne, but had decided that the completion of the accounting exam should be celebrated with kicking off the 2009 motorbike season. I had charged the battery one last time overnight and mounted it for the first time this year. You are always a bit excited the first time you start in the spring. You never know whether the bike will start after several months in the garage. You can then add that my bike is an old 'slow-rider'. A distinguished lady with a personality. Some would even call it an attitude. Sometimes it just decides not start at all for no real reason. Just because it feels like it.

This time there was also the added anxiety of being in a foreign country, where you are not as familiar with the roads, the rules and the customs as you are at home. I was lucky, though. After a few minutes the bike fired and I could leave the dark basement and take off into a bright - but cold - Swiss spring afternoon. With fellow Dane, Simon Sundboell, in the back seat, we took off down the old lake-side road in the direction of Geneva. We had no destination; just cruising up, out and away with the old and flat Jura mountains on the right and the lake and the snow covered pointy alps on the left. A fantastic feeling for two people from a country almost as flat as the Netherlands.

I had forgotten how much I missed cruising on my bike. It is one of the few things that I know I will be doing the rest of my life. The sense of freedom is unmatched by anything else I have done. You just feel how gravity and and the power of the engine pulls you through the curves and you immediately forget all the things that normally fills your head. This year that feeling was probably even stronger because we have been so severely 'locked down' in the vicinity of the school for almost three months.

Thorsten