Tax Time in Tennessee

Well, W-2 time to be precise.

You should see my desk. A little pile of child support correspondence here that I'm going to take care of just as soon as I handle the out of town payroll there that needs to go in the mail as soon as I can get the freaking W-2s in envelopes which I'm going to stuff if I ever finish dotting all my i's and crossing all my t's. Numerically, I mean.

I like numbers. They're so solid, so factual. No debating the meaning of 'is' with a number. And there's the rub, Shakespeare fans. All the little numbers my Epson DFX-8000, staggering and swaying like a old Norge washing machine, cranks out are ultimately my responsibility. And I'm absolutely paranoid about their accuracy, because I will get 10,047 phone calls (approximately) from former employees about how they know they have FIT paid in but their W-2 shows zero. So far, the approximately $100 million* in wages and taxes I have paid and reported have been, as we payroll clerks like to say, absolutely on the money. To. The. Penny. Knock on wood or, alternatively, Bill Gates. My luck will run out eventually, I'm afraid, so I spend hours checking against the quarterly taxes, making sure I've got 9 numbers in that EIN box, and that they're the *right* numbers. That everybody has a first AND last name, because there's always one little software glitch that will screw up every 37th page and diskappear one or the other. And that I'm printing the right freaking year on the right freaking form. And that I put the prior year away when I'm done and don't leave the current year labeled "FIA 2007 Goddammit".

If all that weren't enough to give me a nervous tic and a pressing need for new reading glasses, there's the printer, the previously referenced DFX-8000 that is approximately 80 years old. I sacrificed a kitten and invoked the name of Bes in a glorious pagan ceremony of supplication. Which seemed to help a bit. Most of the W-2s are 4 part forms, but I have two companies that need 6 part forms. The printer has one tractor that still pulls, and it will do a 4 part form if I don't do too many at once. A 6 part form is a no-go, houston-we-have-a-problem. This is where my single greatest payroll/printing skill materializes. Yes, I can stop print in a instant, before the idiosyncratic little jump it tends to take on an 8 1/2 X 11 form can ruin the first W-2. I can shift the printhead left, right, up, and/or down with intuitive grace, in increments so infinitesimal you might think I'm telekinetic. Jazz hands, baby. And without my particular set of skills and level of paranoia, there would be no W-2s for the angry mob we have working for us.

And that's why they pay me the big bucks.



*approximately, I said approximately. ;>


There! Three paragraphs and no mention of soccer, Clint Dempsey, Elvis Costello or Tim Armstrong!