This Is Not My Beautiful Wife

Absolutely slammed at Schlock Montgomery yesterday. Four returns in four hours, three of them relatively complicated returns. Miss Ramada Inn snarled at me: "You need to pick up the pace."

I did not snarl back, You need to go fuck yourself, though I smiled inwardly, thinking it.

There's hardly any light in the back of the Schlock Montgomery office where my desk is, and many W2 forms use 4-point font for entries like employer TINs and wages, all of which must be encoded precisely into the Schlock tax prep software. This meant many minutes spent attempting to study said documents with the magnifying app on my phone.

Plus, the Schlock tax prep software is really klugy compared to the tax prep software I was using as a TaxBwana. Hit the wrong key, and you are signing the client up for a Schlock payday loan at a 36% interest rate—which I did with the first set of clients, a heavily tattooed married couple, filing jointly. It took me 15 minutes to figure my way out of that because I was the only tax preparer in the office; there wasn't anybody else to ask. The clients were not amused.

You can rise from this desk at any moment, tell those clients, "Your tattoos are really ugly, and you suck", I reminded myself as I keyed frantically through solutions. That kept me amused.

And eventually, I found the solution.

My second client was a dapper man in a grey porkpie hat who used to be a correctional officer at Rikers Island.

Rikers Island correctional officers get really good pensions!

Mr. Trapper (not his real name) spends his retirement hanging out in the Newburgh Barnes & Noble reading edifying biographies of Black sports heroes. He could afford to buy those biographies, but I guess he likes being a regular in a crowded place.

I found myself flirting with him! And having fantasies of ambling down to the Newburgh Barnes & Noble, so we could fall in ❤️LUV❤️! Was it the pension? Or the porkpie hat?

My third and fourth clients were a couple in their late thirties, filing separately—she was still married to someone else, which made her claim to Head of Household dubious, but hey! Schlock tax preparers before me had approved it, so who was I to gainsay?

This couple had a combined income substantially less than mine, & I consider myself poor.

In fact, they personified America's white urban underclass. They seemed utterly miserable, and I thought, Well, this is really why the enlightened inhabitants of Alpha Centauri dispatched you to this planet, so you could report back on the desperate look in the woman's eyes: You're a field scientist!

The time did pass quickly.

Only 37 more days to go!

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Daylight saving time has added enough hours to the day so that I can start going to the gym again. So, that's good.

And it finally stopped raining.

The sun came out yesterday, and temps soared into the 60°s, melting the snowbanks & turning the meadows around the casa into a muddy swamp.

This is not my beautiful wife.

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