Care-less

The financial accounting lecturer was telling us the 4 conditions to be satisfied before an item can be considered as a fixed asset.

• it has a useful life of more than one year
• it is owned by the business
• it is used by the business and not meant for resale
• the value is fairly large

He questioned, "So is an eraser considered as a fixed asset?"

I was sitting in the second row so I'm right under his nose.

He asked me, "Can an eraser be used for more than a year?"

My answer to him was - NO (can it?)

Next thing the class chuckled for the first time because the lecturer said, "No? That means you must be a very careless person."

I still replied him, "Ya." (I was hoping that I wasn't blushing.)

Seriously, whether eraser can be used longer than one year depends on the size of the eraser. Moreover if someone uses a pen rather than a pencil most of the time, obviously the eraser can last very long. My lecturer says his eraser can last for 5 years. He might be exaggerating for the purpose of explaining the topic to us. I don't care. It's not funny when I was being laughed on the first lesson. Maybe if this joke was used on someone else in the class, I might laugh. But I wasn't in a very good mood. So yeah... I'll not deny the fact that I'm careless but there's no link with high frequency usage of the eraser.

I'm a perfectionist. If my handwriting is not to my liking or when it's slanted, I will erase it off and write it all over again. I still remember that during primary and secondary school days when we had to write 习字, I put in a lot of effort to produce my best handwriting. Write, rub, write, rub until I'm satisfied with my own work. Yes, it's a waste of time but at least my satisfaction level is very high as compared to those who write it for the sake of writing.

Alright. Back to the fixed asset topic. The conclusion is - eraser is not a fixed asset because it does not have a useful life of more than one year and a more convincing reason will be that the value is too small.