Archive for April 7th, 2005

If what Biggie said was true, I have very few problems

It did my taxes last night,* and I got a whopping $13 dollars back from the Fed, and I owed the state $85.

Because I claimed myself as an exemption, the gov’ment took fewer taxes from each paycheck, and I was able to sock more away in the bank. I earned about $55 in interest, so when you consider how everything came out, it was pretty much balanced at 0.

I don’t mind paying taxes. I like using the roads. I like having a police, fire, and medical response system in place. I appreciate the option of sending a child to school for free. Paying taxes has never been a big deal to me. Certainly, it sucked the year I had to pay about $3000 dollars in taxes owed, but I didn’t hate on taxes because of it.

The only thing that I would change is the way the information is presented to tax preparers. Most of the time, they use confounding language, with definitions hidden in a manual that doesn’t use a traditional numeric ordering system.

Instead of turning to page 18 to find out how to fill out line 12, you have to locate section DZ-423 and then turn to page L9, follow instructions Blue through Banana, and then input the collected information onto line 36DD of your tax form in no jam other than, but not including, strawberry.

Luckily, my brobro and I loves tEh InTArnEts (and technology to boot!) so he found an online system for both the federal and state tax forms. If he’s a good guy, maybe he’ll post the easy peezy lemon squeezy online fed tax link in comments.

*Pre-emtive snide comment defense- My brother did most of the work.

A hair-rying experience

My office is in the middle of the hallway between the lobby and front door, and the end, or corner, of the hall. I hear most of the things that go on in the lobby, and subsequently am forced to deal with the mind-numbingly idiotic discussions that take place there.

For example, this morning one of my coworkers came in wailing about how horribly her hair looked. I can’t personally vouch for the craptitude, or lack thereof, of her new hairstyle, but I can tell you that she paid almost $200 to have her hair cut and colored. Her hair was already short, but now it’s apparently much shorter. She likes the color okay, but hates the way it was cut.

The admins up in the lobby were trying to console her, but she would have nothing of it. I could hear her flapping a magazine around like a loon, probably showing it to everyone who would bother to tolerate her screeching tirade. Pages would flap, and then the sound of skin meeting glossy paper would signify that she had once more pointed out the discrepancy between her haircut, and a model/actresses haircut.

It blows my mind, every time. You know why Meg Ryan and Jennifer Aniston have cute haircuts that you can never manage to match? Because the haircuts were built specifically for their heads and faces. If you put a perfect replica wig of their hair on your head, you would still look like a clown.

This goes for body parts too. If you put Angelina Jolie’s lips on your face, you would look like a freakish monster. Her bone structure and facial composition allow her to have such features. Chances are, yours don’t. But I digress.

As she went on and on about the haircut, it was apparent to me, and anyone else who hear in a range slightly below dog-whistle, that she had not said ANYTHING the entire time she was having her hair cut. Forgive her the fact that she didn’t have the sense to know that she couldn’t put a movie star haircut on her boring head, but she never said anything. How the hell do you watch someone “butcher” your hair (her words) and not say anything about it? It’s her own fault that she got a stupid haircut, and no matter how glass shattering her vocal range becomes, she idiotically passed to the chance to make things better when she could have.

I would have shut my door, but we’ve got an open door policy. I’m not even sure why they had them installed.

UPDATE: It’s ORANGE, and it’s really short. There’s no way she could have been surprised by the result, unless the stylist just took everything down to the nubs at the very beginning. And, as far as I know, no stylist does that. Still, if I paid 200 bucks for that, I would be expecting about 150 bucks to be woven into my hair.

Just buy a goddamned laser jet!

This morning, at 5:24 am, I awoke to this sound.

GRRRREEEEEEEEERRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
GGGRReeeeeeeeezzzzzzzEEEEEErrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzz
GGGRRRRRRrrrreeeeeerrrzzz GGGRRRRReeez GGRReez
GRRRREEEEEEEEERRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

It was the goddamned dot matrix printer of my upstairs neighbors, and it sounded like the ride of the freakin’ Valkyries. Not the composition, mind you, but the actual Valkyries coming to collect the bodies of the fallen. In this case, me, because I was dead tired, and had just been awakened by a dot matrix printer, circa 1985.

You know the kind. They’ve got those feeder dots on the side that you have to tear off. Do they even make that kind of paper anymore?

Jeez. Using a dot matrix printer in 2005 is like referencing “Alf” in a research paper about current sitcoms. It just doesn’t work.

Damnit upstairs neighbors! Get with the times!




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