employablog

I was a little nervous this weekend as I prepared to do my taxes. I made a cup of tea and found my calculator (previous use: Tetris, 12th grade calculus). I found a pencil, purchased a pencil sharpener, and I would have taken the phone off the hook, except I don’t have a phone with a hook. I settled for ‘Silent’: These were the steps I could recall from watching my parents do their taxes until sometime in the mid 90s when I guess they hired an accountant. The whole thing seemed like quite an operation.

Of course, my parents never had the benefit of tax software with deduction maximizers, so I had that going for me. I plopped my laptop on top of all the papers and fired up the software. It asked me a series of questions and the deduction total kept climbing. “Awesome,” I thought. “Doing taxes is fun!” About an hour later I was nearly done. As I was only fully employed for around 25% of 2006, the federal government apparently considers me basically impoverished and I am going to be getting back a lot of what was withheld from each paycheck over the past few months. What success!

I felt confident, I felt grown up. I had done it.

“There are only a few more steps to ensure you’ve maximized your deductions!”

“OK!” I was in a great mood.

“Good news!” the next box said. “The Telephone Excise Tax Refund (TETR) is a one-time payment available on your 2006 federal income tax return. It is designed to refund previously collected long distance telephone taxes. Almost everyone is eligible!”

Everyone except those who have never had a home phone. “No,” I answered, and clicked my ringtone back to Final Countdown.

“Were you affected by Hurricane Katrina?”

Wow, buzz kill, tax software. “No.”

“Did you become a widow/er this year?”

There’s a box I hope I never have to check. I was beginning to understand why people don’t usually think of taxes as awesome. The thought crossed my mind that a real deduction maximizer would be a pretty tough character: “Not a widower, eh? BLAHM! You are now! Oh, and I signed you up for AT&T. In Biloxi.”

“No.”

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Administrative, Home Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.