Tiresomeness
Dec. 26th, 2017 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeThis year I'd filed an extension and did my taxes late. When I did them, I realized that I'd been deducting my state taxes wrong lately and had thus overpaid in 2013, 2014, and 2015. I didn't think it was likely that they'd let me get the money back for 2013, and I also didn't think they'd like me applying the overpayments toward 2016 rather than some future year, but I did those things anyway. Of course they complained, so I wrote a check and took care of it. Or so I thought.
On Friday, the mailman (I know it's more proper to say "letter carrier," but he's male anyway) left a notice in my mailbox that they'd tried to deliver a certified letter to me, from the IRS. This was annoying first because I'd been home all that time (was I in the shower at the critical moment?), and second because this certified letter business would be hanging over me all through Christmas, as the next possible delivery date was today. What did it mean? Did they think I owed more money? Were they going to do something dire to try to get this extra money? Was I going to have to hire a tax attorney? At the very least I was going to have to look carefully at a bunch of paperwork and reconstruct the whole thing again, probably?
Anyway, I went online and formally requested the redelivery. Later, looking at the same page, I saw that they'd previously tried to deliver the letter to me on the 11th! They claimed they'd left a notice, but I certainly didn't receive it. Our letter carriers have never been all that careful with who gets what in the neighborhood. Anyway, I made the request, which meant that I was stuck at home today until its delivery. Fortunately, they've been pretty regular lately - the mail almost always arrives at 2 o'clock. So I waited. I didn't take my shower, and I certainly didn't leave for the various errands that had accumulated over the past few days. I waited for four hours. Finally, at 2:20 pm I went out to check the mailbox, just to see, and lo, the mail was there, with no notice. Great. Now I didn't know whether they hadn't even bothered to try to redeliver it today, or whether I was at the mercy of some extra person who drives about doing the certified mail deliveries. The fact that the previous notice had been left in the box suggested that it really should have just been the regular guy. Blah.
After another 20 minutes of restless fretting, I asked J. to come sit in my house for me so I could take a shower, and then, if the friend who was coming over to hang out with him hadn't yet let him know he was on his way, to sit here a bit longer so I could drive to the post office and ask someone about it. He brought his Brandon Sanderson book over here and sat on the couch with Sorin, and I showered, and then I drove to the post office. I was instructed not to stand in the line but to ring the silver bell at the special counter. And a woman came to help me, and it turned out that they hadn't managed to get the letter to the carrier today (he was supposed to get/print a special list or something), and they still had it. It took a good five minutes or more for her to find her scanner and get it to work properly so she could give me the letter, but eventually she did, and I called J. and let him know he could go home, and I drove there and read the letter. And... it was just a formal notice that I couldn't get that refund for 2013.
Naturally after all this, I was in just the mood to spend an hour at my office trying to move my files in an organized fashion from the h: drive and the o: drive to the s: drive and the u: drive, which have different conventions and permissions than the h: drive and the o: drive, on which I'd been accumulating files for the past 25 years. And then to have my office hard drive announce that - even with the disk cleanup I attempted last week - there was only 1GB available on the hard drive, well, that was just silly, since I barely keep anything of my own on that machine at all. I'd be surprised if my files even total 1GB themselves. I tried to install Windirstat to figure out where on earth all these mystery files might be, but I didn't have the authority to do that. So I gave up and went home. All in all, today did not feel like a productive day.
On Friday, the mailman (I know it's more proper to say "letter carrier," but he's male anyway) left a notice in my mailbox that they'd tried to deliver a certified letter to me, from the IRS. This was annoying first because I'd been home all that time (was I in the shower at the critical moment?), and second because this certified letter business would be hanging over me all through Christmas, as the next possible delivery date was today. What did it mean? Did they think I owed more money? Were they going to do something dire to try to get this extra money? Was I going to have to hire a tax attorney? At the very least I was going to have to look carefully at a bunch of paperwork and reconstruct the whole thing again, probably?
Anyway, I went online and formally requested the redelivery. Later, looking at the same page, I saw that they'd previously tried to deliver the letter to me on the 11th! They claimed they'd left a notice, but I certainly didn't receive it. Our letter carriers have never been all that careful with who gets what in the neighborhood. Anyway, I made the request, which meant that I was stuck at home today until its delivery. Fortunately, they've been pretty regular lately - the mail almost always arrives at 2 o'clock. So I waited. I didn't take my shower, and I certainly didn't leave for the various errands that had accumulated over the past few days. I waited for four hours. Finally, at 2:20 pm I went out to check the mailbox, just to see, and lo, the mail was there, with no notice. Great. Now I didn't know whether they hadn't even bothered to try to redeliver it today, or whether I was at the mercy of some extra person who drives about doing the certified mail deliveries. The fact that the previous notice had been left in the box suggested that it really should have just been the regular guy. Blah.
After another 20 minutes of restless fretting, I asked J. to come sit in my house for me so I could take a shower, and then, if the friend who was coming over to hang out with him hadn't yet let him know he was on his way, to sit here a bit longer so I could drive to the post office and ask someone about it. He brought his Brandon Sanderson book over here and sat on the couch with Sorin, and I showered, and then I drove to the post office. I was instructed not to stand in the line but to ring the silver bell at the special counter. And a woman came to help me, and it turned out that they hadn't managed to get the letter to the carrier today (he was supposed to get/print a special list or something), and they still had it. It took a good five minutes or more for her to find her scanner and get it to work properly so she could give me the letter, but eventually she did, and I called J. and let him know he could go home, and I drove there and read the letter. And... it was just a formal notice that I couldn't get that refund for 2013.
Naturally after all this, I was in just the mood to spend an hour at my office trying to move my files in an organized fashion from the h: drive and the o: drive to the s: drive and the u: drive, which have different conventions and permissions than the h: drive and the o: drive, on which I'd been accumulating files for the past 25 years. And then to have my office hard drive announce that - even with the disk cleanup I attempted last week - there was only 1GB available on the hard drive, well, that was just silly, since I barely keep anything of my own on that machine at all. I'd be surprised if my files even total 1GB themselves. I tried to install Windirstat to figure out where on earth all these mystery files might be, but I didn't have the authority to do that. So I gave up and went home. All in all, today did not feel like a productive day.