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Day-Trading and Auditions
Mar. 21st, 2023 08:22 amOn the vernal equinox, the weather turned lovely.
###
I spent literally the whole day working on taxes for one client—a young Turkish man, Ichabod’s age, who’d booked three hours (which spilled over into seven) for doing 2020, 2021, and 2022.
He’d spent most of that time in Turkey with his American wife and their child and happened to be visiting his parents in Gaziantep when the big earthquake hit. “We were all right, praise Allah. My parents were all right, praise Allah. But we slept in the car for nights. And we took my parents back to Ankara.”
He was an interesting client in that he was missing several W2s, which I painstakingly resurrected—“Do you have friends who worked there who did get W2 forms? Call them and see if you get the company’s EIN from them”—but had also been day-trading with Big Money—$170,000 in ETFs on Day One; $168,000 in ETFs on Day Five.
“That’s like legal gambling,” I scoffed.
He laughed. “It’s the way to get rich.”
He was very handsome and very intense, and I wondered about the little Poughkeepsie girl who’d fallen in love with him and how the whole marriage thing to a handsome, intense man who had definite ideas about a woman’s role in a marriage was working out for her.
###
Anyway, I was there until 3:30 pm, and so was Linda, a new TaxBwana and a recent transplant to upstate New York, who—get this—had gone to UC Berkeley and spent 35 years working in the diplomatic corps.
She actually takes the bus in from Tivoli to be a TaxBwana!
That is like a 40-mile haul and a two-hour ride.
I saw that she had missed her 2pm bus. The next one didn’t come till 4 pm, so I offered her a ride home.
She was overcome with gratitude, but I had an ulterior motive: I was auditioning her to see if she could become a friend. Or at least, an activity partner.
And indeed, we both like being TaxBwanas for exactly the same reason: the interesting stories, the interesting people, that we would otherwise never hear or meet.
She actually grew up in Irvine, California, which is like the next town over from Tustin, the town where my first X-Husband and his family live and where Ichabod spent all his summers.
She doesn’t say, “Fuck!” quite often enough. But by the end of the car trip, I’d coaxed a few “Fuck!”s out of her, so I’d say she’s promising friend material.
###
I spent literally the whole day working on taxes for one client—a young Turkish man, Ichabod’s age, who’d booked three hours (which spilled over into seven) for doing 2020, 2021, and 2022.
He’d spent most of that time in Turkey with his American wife and their child and happened to be visiting his parents in Gaziantep when the big earthquake hit. “We were all right, praise Allah. My parents were all right, praise Allah. But we slept in the car for nights. And we took my parents back to Ankara.”
He was an interesting client in that he was missing several W2s, which I painstakingly resurrected—“Do you have friends who worked there who did get W2 forms? Call them and see if you get the company’s EIN from them”—but had also been day-trading with Big Money—$170,000 in ETFs on Day One; $168,000 in ETFs on Day Five.
“That’s like legal gambling,” I scoffed.
He laughed. “It’s the way to get rich.”
He was very handsome and very intense, and I wondered about the little Poughkeepsie girl who’d fallen in love with him and how the whole marriage thing to a handsome, intense man who had definite ideas about a woman’s role in a marriage was working out for her.
###
Anyway, I was there until 3:30 pm, and so was Linda, a new TaxBwana and a recent transplant to upstate New York, who—get this—had gone to UC Berkeley and spent 35 years working in the diplomatic corps.
She actually takes the bus in from Tivoli to be a TaxBwana!
That is like a 40-mile haul and a two-hour ride.
I saw that she had missed her 2pm bus. The next one didn’t come till 4 pm, so I offered her a ride home.
She was overcome with gratitude, but I had an ulterior motive: I was auditioning her to see if she could become a friend. Or at least, an activity partner.
And indeed, we both like being TaxBwanas for exactly the same reason: the interesting stories, the interesting people, that we would otherwise never hear or meet.
She actually grew up in Irvine, California, which is like the next town over from Tustin, the town where my first X-Husband and his family live and where Ichabod spent all his summers.
She doesn’t say, “Fuck!” quite often enough. But by the end of the car trip, I’d coaxed a few “Fuck!”s out of her, so I’d say she’s promising friend material.
