I sat down this morning to do my taxes. Now it is early but those of you who follow this blog know that I have been having some health issues and I didn’t want to run the risk of not having the taxes done and winding up in the hospital and leaving the Long Sufferin’ holding the bag.
Now I did taxes for H & R Block for four years and I have a solid working knowledge of the dark mysteries of the federal tax system. I’ve used all of the major consumer tax preparation programs and after filed testing them for several years I can say Turbo Tax is the best. (Sorry Block, your in-store software better than anything else in the world but the consumer product is just feeble.)
And I’ve use Turbo Tax every since I moved to Oregon because living in a state tax free place like Texas state taxes were new and terrifying.
Turbo Tax makes getting the state return a delight and while I don’t enjoy paying the State of Oregon, if I can do it without gritting my teeth and whimpering that’s all good.
So I opened my copy of Turbo Tax and feed it to the machine and was sailing along on moonlight bay when the state portion of the program burped.
It simply would not load the state return portion of the program no matter what I tried to do.
After fighting with it for an hour, (Have I mentioned lately that I love computers but I HATE software?), I swallowed a time or two and called tech support.
Now if you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with tech support I despise you, I loath you, I envy you, to my way of thinking you are the crabgrass on the lawn of life, for talking to tech support is the closest thing to being a guest of the Gestapo you can ever experience and live to tell the tale.
In most cases getting a root canal without anesthesia is more fun and a lot less painful than dealing with tech support. Most of what I know about computers is driven by the need to avoid talking to tech support.
So I called. Now if you haven’t you don’t know that when you call tech support you don’t get a real, live human person, you get a disembodied voice which tells you, “Your call is important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received. Your wait time is approximately one millennia or the end of time whichever comes first.”
They are serious by the way, you if you are determined get to listen to the absolutely worst music, so bad it makes elevator look like Manhattan jazz clubs, played at life threatening volume and if you are lucky so badly recorded that the pops and cracks drown out the noise/music.
After your arm has gone to sleep holding the phone, (Interestingly enough now that most of us have done away with our landlines, the question becomes will I drop off in a coma or will the phone battery die before I get to talk to a human being?) a person, who may or may not A). Speak English and B). Have any idea of what they are supposed to be supporting. This is just the teaser person.
You won’t actually get anything useful from this one, be pleasant and polite and wait for them to become confused and put you back on hold.
The next day when another person answers you have a much better chance of getting someone who can actually help.
This is what happened to me. The first person I spoke with had no idea what I was talking about and couldn’t figure out what he was supposed to do, (yeah he was a guy and they are supposed to be the Nerd-o Supreme-o types) and he went away and left me back on hold.
Now it’s not like I could throw a hissy fit and hang up. I had the federal return completed and the Oregon return feeds off the federal so I couldn’t jut go buy another program so I stayed. It is a good thing that I did. I drew the gold bean.
Tasha didn’t know the answer. She tried many things to get me up and running. None of them worked. In the end the supervisor had to authorize a complete program, download. But that was the right fix and the State of Oregon owes Tasha a nice thank you cause they got their forms and now if the Croaker sends me off to white-gown prison the Long Sufferin' won’t be left to face the Inquisition.
The message here is clear, even if you know what you are doing and have the right product bad things can happen and you could wind up being behind in your filling and that boys and girls is a really, really bad thing. The nice folks down at the IRS don’t care what happened to your dog, the ranch, your daddy’s blue Olds, they don’t care if you get Plague or the heart-break of psoriasis or hangnails, they want their money and their forms and if you don’t give it to them they will make Attila look like a hon.
The worst thing you can do is not file. They will fall on you like a mountain and they love to do that to people like artists who they secretly think are scamming them anyway, so get your taxes together and filled long before April or you will get to meet the lovely kinder and gentler IRS headed by their new head collector Vlad the Impaler.
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