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As I type these words I am currently on hold with the good folks who supply the product we'll call "Tax Frustration In a Box" or TFIB for short. My time on hold currently stands at twenty-five minutes.
I would like to tell you the story of how I wound up here, with my ear to the phone, waiting for a recorded voice to tell me to keep waiting. And so, I will. It all started when we bought a house. I knew my days of filing 1040EZ were over. Complicated tax forms were one of the reasons I had avoided getting a house for so long. Of course there were other factors as well, like, for example, poverty. When it came time to do our taxes after our first year of owning a house, we took our receipts, W2's, tax forms, and any other paperwork we had with numbers on it that we didn't understand, to a gentleman we'll call Joe. Joe was happy to do our taxes. He joked and laughed with us as he did. At one point he casually mentioned some of the audits his business had undergone. "Boy, I'm sure glad we don't have to worry about those anymore!" he exclaimed. We solemnly nodded in agreement. I don't often look "askance" at people, but this was definitely an occasion when I did. I looked askance at my wife. She grimaced. Our appointment with Joe was a couple months before the April deadline, but due to a clerical error on the part of his staff, we didn't receive the copies we needed to sign and send in until the day of April 15th. In life, I have found that, if I swear I am never going to do something, my chances of doing it automatically go up. Being a part of the mass of people who are running to the post office late on April 15th was one such thing. I swear I'll never do it again. That experience prompted us to take another route with our taxes this year. Let's return to the present. My wife just called down to me from the bedroom. "Are you still on hold?" she asked incredulously. "Yes." I answered. The elapsed time is now thirty-five minutes. You are here, live, as it happens. Isn't this exciting? Wait! The tech guy from TFIB just came on the line. His name is Nigel. He seems tense. Poor Nigel. He sounds like someone who has been getting yelled at by people who have been on hold for long periods of time. No doubt, many of them were recently online and discovered that TFIB Inc. is having serious problems with its computer servers, making Internet support a virtual joke: "Knock. Knock." "Who's there?" "Download Terminated, that's who!" I had to take a break to work with Nigel, but I'm back. You'll be glad to know that I was nice to him and I did not call him any bad names. The only negative word used at all in our conversation was "squirrelly." This was how I described the appearance of my State Tax return when the TFIB software printed it out. "It's a technical term," I said to him. "I know," he said. "I use it a lot myself. Really, I do." We have a bond Nigel and I. We both hate the company he works for. One of the reasons we needed some sort of guidance when doing our taxes is that we have to fill out a Schedule C. It's required because I write a lot of columns just like this. It is my hope that, someday, I will get paid for one of them. On that day, my wife and I will celebrate with a nice dinner and, most likely, I will choke on something and die, having fulfilled my purpose on this here planet. In the meantime, I annually fill out a Schedule C for sole proprietorship of a business (writing) and on the line for income I put a big fat zero. But don't worry about me. I'll be fine... This year we initially decided to find someone else besides Joe Getyouaudited to do our taxes. We asked around. Our friends and acquaintances, who usually go berserk making recommendations for tax services, were strangely silent this year. It was as if they were all keeping their tax people a big secret. I am beginning to see why. A good tax person is a rare commodity. Finding one is like finding the peanut in a bag of Cracker Jacks. We checked the phone book. We drove around. We passed a tumbledown shack that said "Pepe's Taxes" and kept on driving. We jotted down the phone number that was posted on a sign outside of someone's house. We threw it out when the owner of the house came outside in his undershirt to wave to us. After much debate between me and myself, (to which my wife patiently listened) we found ourselves standing inside a building that offered professional tax services. They have a logo that is in the shape of a green box, which, I figured out later, is symbolic of how your money looks when it is cut up into pieces. There were rows of desks in the building. Two of the desks were occupied with tax counselors working with clients. We stood in front of the reception desk. There was no one behind it. It is one thing to be on hold for fifty minutes, but is another thing to be standing in a room, where people can see you, where it's obvious that you need help and are willing to pay money for it, and where you are completely ignored. Painfully reminded of my younger days spent in the singles bars, I turned and walked out. A half-hour later, driven by sheer desperation, we returned. The same two people were sitting at desks. One of them didn't have any clients. She ignored us. The guy who did have a client, got up from his seat and asked if he could help us. We told him we wanted to schedule an appointment, so he went to go get the receptionist. The receptionist was cleverly hidden away in the back of the building where she wouldn't have to be inconvenienced by helping people. The room was quiet except for a sharp smacking and popping noise. The noise was coming from the tax counselor who did not have a client. She was having a field day with her gum. "Please God," I thought, "Don't let her be the one to do our taxes." I had the feeling that I was looking askance again. Like Oz from behind the curtain, the receptionist appeared to schedule our appointment. "Monday around six would be good," I said. "I'll put you down with Kim," the receptionist said, gesturing towards the gum-smacker. "She's really good." Kim suddenly found our activities to be worthy of interest. "Don't schedule those people at the same time that I have another appointment!" Kim shouted across the room. She punctuated it with a pop. "Rebecca did that to me the other day -- scheduled two appointments at once! Can you believe that?" "You know what?," I said to the receptionist, "Can you schedule us with somebody else?" Kim was up at the desk now. "Make sure you don't...Smack!...put them down when I'm doing somebody else's taxes! Pop! I can't do more than one return at a time." "They're scheduled with somebody else," the receptionist told her. "Oh... Well. I can't believe I was scheduled for two appointments at once!" The windows vibrated with her voice. She popped her gum again. A dog outside barked at the noise. I asked about the price, gulped upon hearing the answer, and left quickly. In the car, I turned to my wife. "So honey, will you call and cancel tomorrow or do you want me to cancel?" "I'll do it," she said. Which is how we ended up using the TFIB software. Lucky for us all, Nigel was just able to solve my problem with his company's squirrelly software and, as I type this, my State return is printing out on our new computer that we claimed depreciation on. There is one catch, though. Electronic filing and the state software, which are advertised on the TFIB package as free, are only "free" if you submit rebate forms. Yes, that's correct, as a result of buying software to help you fill out forms, you have to... fill out more forms. Personally, I'm not sure how to do them. Tomorrow, I'll go find somebody who can help me. Hey, maybe there's software for it! |
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