Ah, tax time. It’s the time of year that never fails to remind me I have the organizational skills of a 3-month old golden retriever. You know how most normal, functioning adults have some kind of filing system (I assume)? Probably something involving drawers and files and tabs and labels and other things I don’t own. You want to know what my system is? “Throw Everything In a Box and Promptly Forget About It.”
This usually works for me… except once a year, when the dreaded envelope arrives in the mail, bold type ominously proclaiming, “Federal tax information enclosed.”
Noooooooo! Not my W-2’s! That means I have to drag out The Box and sift through a year’s worth of receipts, bills and other paper miscellanea. It might as well be called Box O’Ambien.
Since my husband handles the tax appointment, a horrifying expedition that literally takes half a work day, the responsibility of getting all those nasty papers together falls to me. As awful as it is, it’s a way lesser evil than sitting in Tax Lady’s house for hours, listening to her conspiracy theories and slowly suffocating from cigarette fumes and dog fur. While doing taxes. That’s what hell is, you know that, right? Okay, maybe not the dog fur part. Because all dogs go to heaven, duh. Everyone knows that.
So I was filling out my 2014-2015 FASFA for grad school (my life is full of fun right now) and realized I needed my 2012 taxes as a reference. To The Box! No taxes. A pile of birthday cards? Check. Grocery receipt from an ice cream run? Check. Empty container with no clues to what it formerly contained (possibly ice cream)? Check plus! This is what I’m talking about, folks. How am I allowed to function in society if this is how I run my life? I’m like a kid who constantly spins around in circles, runs into a wall, then gets up and start spinning again. My entire financial history can be summed up in one word: Derp!
And my husband is worse at this stuff than me, if that’s even possible. How we found each other and what cosmic joke brought our dysfunctional brains together in marriage is something humankind may never know. Instead of balancing each other out, we’re knocking each other down, like a never-ending game of chicken.
My new plan is to place an ad on LinkedIn for a self-loathing, down-on-their-luck and (preferably) desperate accountant-type person to transform our finances into a mecca of organization. I don’t know what that would look like. A really fancy box?
Make this happen, someone.
Jessie Lea Pingle 