The Big Thaw
Feb. 10th, 2022 10:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
I was very sad to learn that Entertainment Weekly is suspending print publication.
I was never on staff there but did write for them quite a bit as a freelancer. As EW didn’t work with freelancers very often, this was quite a coup—though as a People Mag employee, I was part of the greater Time Inc. family, so already vetted by the fact checkers, I suppose.
EW was a great magazine—snappy prose, insightful pop culture analyses.
Whoever thought the great Time Inc. media empire would topple?
Pas moi.
###
Yesterday’s TaxBwana-ing stint was pretty awful.
My first client of the day was a lady with wig problems. “It’s too tight!” she kept telling me; it was giving her a headache, and this was the reason why she hadn’t brought most of the necessary documentation in with her, though not the reason why she kept slipping her mask down to her chin! No, that was so she could cough in my face and wipe her nose on her fingers.
“Please keep your mask on,” I said. And then leapt from my chair, grabbed a jumbo-sized bottle of sanitizer and a box of tissues, and thrust them at her.
The coughing didn’t bother me too much: I recognize a smoker’s bronchitis when I hear it.
But I dislike being exposed to other people’s bodily fluids unless I expressly invite exposure.
I sat with this lady for an hour, talking her through logging on to the unemployment website, changing her password, accessing her unemployment info. Lady became increasingly chatty, deluging me with details about her feckless man friend. I do not want to hear about your man friend, thought I—though had I been in a better mood, of course, I’d want to hear all about her man friend. And all the man friends that came before him!
Finally, we hit a wall.
She wanted her refund to be directly deposited. But we cannot authorize direct deposits without specific routing and account information.
“Can’t they just look up my name and get that when, you know, they’re processing the form?”
No, ma’am. They cannot.
In the background, Mary Anne was entering into the 20th straight minute of a monologue, droning on and on and on about the relative merits of staples versus paper clips as a means of holding clumps of documents together.
This is what hell is like, I thought. I mean—surely each individual has a slightly different idea of hell, right? And God has deep pockets so He can personalize it?
The upshot is that I am going to go into TaxBwana—ugh!—an hour early Wednesday to finish up her 1040.
###
My last work for the day was a QA check on tax returns generated for a married couple who earn $190,000 a year.
In the first place, I have serious reservations about people who make $190,000 a year using TaxBwana’s services.
I mean, true—we don’t have income restrictions as such.
There’s no rule that you have to be worthy but poor to utilize TaxBwana’s services.
But c’mon.
Surely, you must understand. You can afford to pay H & R Block. This is an abuse of the system.
In the second place, though, the couple had been demanding. They’d somehow talked Kathy, their tax preparer, into completing their return two different ways—married filing jointly and married filing separately—to see which method would save them the most money. Kathy is a lovely woman who has a hard time saying, No, and the scheme she’d come up with—married filing separately, she’d itemize, he’d take the standard deduction—saved them a shitload of money.
Except it can’t be done.
“If they file separately, they have to use the same deduction,” I told Kathy. “So, they’d both have to itemize, or they’d both have to use the standard deduction. The IRS tries to disincentivize married filing separately as much as possible.”
Poor Kathy! It had taken her four hours to do the returns.
I ended up combining the two returns into one joint return, rejoicing inwardly over the huge amount of back taxes the couple was now on the hook for.
They were not happy about that.
“Don’t e-file this,” the man snapped. “I’ll take my business some place else.”
You do that, asshole, I thought.
But smiled politely. “That’s always your choice, of course, sir.”
“Business?”
Was that a joke?
###
I ended up staying two hours beyond the end of my shift.
So, it was very late in the afternoon by the time I set forth tromping, and I only managed to get three miles in.
After three weeks in Siberia, temps have now risen into the 40°s. We’re into the Big Thaw.
Saw a parhelion, what they call a “sun dog.”
Sun dogs are supposed to be rare.
But we see them all the time around here.
no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 06:38 pm (UTC)Oh my gosh. That couple. So frustrating. I hope you have a better day today.
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Date: 2022-02-10 06:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 09:18 pm (UTC)Rich people are so often such assholes. I hope they do wind up paying the taxes they should be paying, after that nonsense.
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Date: 2022-02-10 11:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 11:22 pm (UTC)That married couple sound even worse than the woman with the cough.
Where did Mary Anne come down on staples versus paperclips?
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Date: 2022-02-10 11:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-10 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-11 12:12 am (UTC)Fasten-ating?
Yuk, yuk, yuk! 😀
Why wait for tomorrow? I have her phone number! I'll just call her and have an hour-long conversation about it right now!
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Date: 2022-02-11 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 01:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 09:04 pm (UTC)Live and learn, right? The return was done correctly in the end.