|
|
|
marvels of the information age
Monday, April 15 2002
My accountant has had my tax paperwork for the past three or four weeks and these last few days I've been worried he wasn't going to complete them in time. In opposition to my nature, I've had to be proactive with the guy when (by rights) it's his job to be the pushy one. Anyway, today I dropped in on him to see if he was done (as he said he would be). He said he was still waiting for the California forms to arrive by mail and if they didn't come today, we'd have to file an extension. This all made sense at the time of our conversation, but out on the street I realized that it's a simple matter to go to the California Franchise Tax Board website and download all the forms. It's been possible to do this for years. Obviously, my accountant had yet to acquaint himself with the latest marvels of the information age. (Indeed, every time I've dropped in on him, I've found him doing his sums with an old printing calculator.) Well, I didn't want to fuck around, so I immediately went home, downloaded the forms, printed them out, and hand-delivered them some minutes later. The accountant was more impressed than insulted and asked, "Did you do that with a computer?" "Yeah, it's all on the internet these days," I explained.
Some hours later I called him and found out that my taxes were done. Pleasantly, I'll be getting my biggest refund ever this year, mostly because of complexities from the sale of my Los Angeles real estate. Unfortunately, I also found myself owing over a thousand dollars to the State of New York because of taxes that Yahoo! forgot to withhold.
Today was the warmest day yet of the year. I was wearing a CollegeClub.com teeshirt for most of the day, mostly without feeling embarrassed. Dotcom teeshirts have a kitsch value these days, sort of like Headbangers' Ball coffee mugs.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020415 feedback
previous | next |
