With 24 hours left to file last year’s income taxes,
at this point, all I have to do is sign, seal, and deliver. Oh, and write a
monstrous check to the IRS, but we’ll save that catastrophic circumstance for a
future therapy session. I mean, blog.
Tax Day means the three banker’s boxes and myriad
electronic documents containing last year’s receipts and financial paperwork
can now safely be confined to an internet cloud and the spidery reaches of our
basement crawl space, never to be handled again. (IRS Audit Gods willing)
It’s time to—gulp—turn my attention to three and a
half months’ worth of this year’s finances, currently cluttering my real and
virtual inboxes as well as my poor stressed right-brained brain.
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When at last the receipts make it to my office, they
sit in a lovely wicker basket patiently awaiting my post-Tax-Day attention. The
beauty of the lovely wicker basket is that you can ignore the heap and stash it
in the dryer whenever the cleaning lady comes, until it overflows. Then you
have to buy a bigger lovely wicker basket, and remember to save the receipt,
because it’s a business expense since it goes on your desk in your office when
it’s not in the dryer.
Tomorrow, I will devote at least half an hour to
processing this year’s receipts.
This entails reaching for the first one, uncrumpling
it, and attempting to discern whether it is, indeed, even a receipt? Or is it
one of those printouts you get when you buy a gift card? The ones you can never
find when the person for whom you bought it tries to use it and can’t even
though you spent twenty five bucks plus a $4.95 activation fee?
Typically, upon determining that I do have a bona
fide receipt in hand, I remember that my last birthday seems to have robbed me
of the ability to distinguish smallish letters from each other, or from
numbers, or from a child’s crayon drawings. I pause to search the house for one
of my husband’s many pairs of reading glasses—the cheapo kind you buy in
four-packs at CVS—because I’m much too young to need, much less buy, my own
reading glasses.
Once I’ve borrowed the glasses, Windexed away
fingerprints, pawprints, and—are those coffee spatters?—I return to the
receipt, and sometimes find that it wasn’t my eyes after all. Occasionally, the
type is already faded with age, or courtesy of some store clerk having shirked
register-tape-ink responsibilities, or someone (cat? husband?) at one point
spilled something on it (coffee? Husband!) and it’s too smeared to read.
Sometimes, even when the receipt is less blurry than
it was before the readers, it’s more confusing. Either it’s itemized with
cryptic scan numbers and not words (i.e. ABC123SquareRootOfPi
instead of paper clips), or the
name of the business is missing at the top, or it’s mysterious—i.e., Flummadiddle’s and not Staples or Starbucks.
Thus, it may require a good amount of detective work
to determine that two or three seasons ago, I bought a pen or iced tea at a
locally-owned shop during a business trip to…wait, which Portland is that?
At last, the receipt has been deciphered, entered
into my records, and dropped into another lovely wicker basket to await
eventual transport to a banker’s box and (a year from now) the spidery
basement. I reach for the next receipt, and—hey, look, three hours have passed
and I haven’t written a word of the novel that’s due tomorrow.
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking I should hire an assistant to handle
these things. Trust me, assistants come with far more complicated financial
paperwork. Oh, yeah, and I just wrote
that monstrous check to the IRS so I’m too broke to spend on anything pricier
than…uh, whatever it is that I bought back in January for eighty-nine cents at
an unrecognizable store in an undisclosed location.
