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Takes Many Forms
Mar. 27th, 2011 10:21 pmI took this weekend off from working on the film or doing any overtime, even though I need student loan money and film stuff is time dependent, because I've been pulling back-to-back 60 and 70 hour weeks for a month or more, and I'm trying to avoid burnout. So it seemed like a good plan. But I also needed to do my taxes, which I did today because I could justify two days off but not three days off.
My taxes are always complicated and time consuming. I inevitably have income from a lot of sources, very few of which send me paperwork, and I usually have a lot of weird and hard to document deductions on top of that. I get audited regularly as a result, or did under Bush, which is not scary because I'm always found right or to have overpaid. I just mention to point up that my taxes are complicated.
This year, they were the most complicated ever, and the federal ones took close to four hours. (I promise a pro would not have been faster.) But the real problem was state taxes. No online form, free or expensive, seemed able to handle a part-year Massachusetts resident. They all said they could, and then tried to make me pay six times the state income tax I owe when I should be getting money back (as if I had lived here all year). They also wanted me to re-enter all my federal info instead of letting me skip ahead. I eventually printed out the paper forms, which were straightforward, which only served to make me angrier at all the web filers that couldn't handle it.
So eight hours after I started, I'm finally done. I try to think of it as making $4500 for a day's work (let it not be said that Obama has never done anything for me), but I'm exhausted and in a terrible mood and might as well not have taken Friday and Saturday off because I'm burned out anyway and haven't finished the work I didn't do on Friday and Saturday. Maybe I can take a personal day tomorrow. Except tomorrow is busy at work tomorrow and they need me.
Maybe Justified and Cheetos will help.
My taxes are always complicated and time consuming. I inevitably have income from a lot of sources, very few of which send me paperwork, and I usually have a lot of weird and hard to document deductions on top of that. I get audited regularly as a result, or did under Bush, which is not scary because I'm always found right or to have overpaid. I just mention to point up that my taxes are complicated.
This year, they were the most complicated ever, and the federal ones took close to four hours. (I promise a pro would not have been faster.) But the real problem was state taxes. No online form, free or expensive, seemed able to handle a part-year Massachusetts resident. They all said they could, and then tried to make me pay six times the state income tax I owe when I should be getting money back (as if I had lived here all year). They also wanted me to re-enter all my federal info instead of letting me skip ahead. I eventually printed out the paper forms, which were straightforward, which only served to make me angrier at all the web filers that couldn't handle it.
So eight hours after I started, I'm finally done. I try to think of it as making $4500 for a day's work (let it not be said that Obama has never done anything for me), but I'm exhausted and in a terrible mood and might as well not have taken Friday and Saturday off because I'm burned out anyway and haven't finished the work I didn't do on Friday and Saturday. Maybe I can take a personal day tomorrow. Except tomorrow is busy at work tomorrow and they need me.
Maybe Justified and Cheetos will help.
