How Patience Got Me Through A Stressful Bout Of Taxes
I know tax stress. This is the first year I had to do them and it was a little ulcer-y to say the least.
At first, I wasn't too worried. I asked my mom if she could help and she was all:
And I was like,
And then a week later, days before the 15th (tax day) Mom calls me up and basically was like,
I reacted calmly, being a fancy adult and all, but on the inside my thoughts were,
She offered immediately to pay for a tax agent to get it sorted. I scheduled two appointments just in case the first one failed for some reason (pretty fancy, adult-like forethought, no? You bet your sweet tookus it was). I almost needed the second appointment because my agent DIDN'T SHOW UP TO THE FIRST ONE. I sat in the office waiting room like a ticking time bomb of anxiety. Soon before my eyes glazed over and my chair ended up being tossed through the window, another agent name RJ came to my rescue.
Then a blue lightening bolt screamed across the sky and the power went out. I kept my cool while other clueless, stressed out clients, and even some of the tax agents, up to their eyeballs in clueless, stressed-out clients, were like,
But then it came back!! All six agents and the dozen clients let out a collective sigh of relief. RJ, my agent in shining polyester, sat me down at a computer, hardly phased by the outage. While we waited for his computer to reboot, he wore a genuine smile as he initiated ernest small talk. The computer dinged to life and we were in business. Or so we thought. RJ looked at his computer screen and made this face:
And I was like,
I thought something was wrong with my taxes and that I wouldn't be able to file them and I would spend the rest of my life in jail for tax-evasion. Turned out that RJ's keyboard and mouse just weren't working. Whew. Cue second sigh of relief of the night.
We picked up and went to another computer. Same problem. This occurred one more time until we found a computer with properly working tools. That's three sighs of relief and we hadn't even begun. RJ apologized and I told him not to worry about it. "Tonight is taxes night, and I'm doing nothing else with my time," I said, suddenly feeling older. RJ didn't look discouraged once he got the software running, so I was feeling good. As we went through all five of my W-2s and 1099s, he explained everything to a T, in the most understandable way I imagine one explains the labyrinthian process of filing taxes.
Taxes before RJ:
Taxes after RJ:
If you haven't done your taxes yet, get to it soon, or schedule an appointment right meow! It's going to be stressful, that's just the nature of the beast. The best way to step through it all is with patience. Patience will encourage your professional to keep his/her professionalism in tact. The more patient you are, the quicker you'll have filed your taxes and you can leave your agent's office without the worldly weight of tax season on your shoulders.
