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Drunk with TurboTax
Apr. 10th, 2009 12:20 amFor as long as I can remember, my mom has done the taxes in our family.
If you were only superficially familiar with my parents, their personalities and their predilections, you might find this division of labor curious. My father is the detail-oriented devote of all things logical and quantifiable who plays chess and works on robots in his spare time; my mother is the self-identified 'global' 'random' who reads magazines from the back forward and strings together entire sentences without a single proper noun. Even when I was little, while accepting the natural order of things as the very young naturally do, I found this curious.
It all made sense in the end, thougg. It turns out that my mother, strongly encouraged by her Depression-era father, took a degree in Business Education, which was the safest and easiest education degree she could get with the fewest credit hours, and then there she was, with this electronic typewriter that was incredibly smart, under the circumstances, and knowledge of how to use it. Not only did it pretend to understand what you were typing; it would remember it, for one whole line at a time! This was truly impressive, and honestly, it produced more readable results than my father's Commodore 64. No wonder that my mother ended up taking over tax preparation.
These days, she purchases the latest edition of TurboTax almost as soon as it's available, but that doesn't stop her from doing my taxes, even if she has to grab my W-2 out of my hands to do so. (So far, not necessary, but I keep this in mind when it comes to what address my electronic checks are 'sent to'.) Having forced herself to prepare all tax forms every year, she is overly-enthusiastic about her self-appointed role, and yet it is a world of easier to let her steal my W-2 and file my takes for me every year, including 2008, when she basically seized them without my explicit permission than to actually do it myself. Drunken with the possibilities offered by basic software wizards, she forced me to itemize my deductions, purely as an experiment, even though the final result was less than a third of my standard deduction, amply confirming my desire to file a 1040EZ in the first place.
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coercedbynutmeg would no doubt do a better job checking over my filing, and wisdomeagle would hopefully not flag me for errors. Not that my mother would allow me to do my own taxes in the first places, when she is perfectly capable of using her latest version of TurboTax ....
If you were only superficially familiar with my parents, their personalities and their predilections, you might find this division of labor curious. My father is the detail-oriented devote of all things logical and quantifiable who plays chess and works on robots in his spare time; my mother is the self-identified 'global' 'random' who reads magazines from the back forward and strings together entire sentences without a single proper noun. Even when I was little, while accepting the natural order of things as the very young naturally do, I found this curious.
It all made sense in the end, thougg. It turns out that my mother, strongly encouraged by her Depression-era father, took a degree in Business Education, which was the safest and easiest education degree she could get with the fewest credit hours, and then there she was, with this electronic typewriter that was incredibly smart, under the circumstances, and knowledge of how to use it. Not only did it pretend to understand what you were typing; it would remember it, for one whole line at a time! This was truly impressive, and honestly, it produced more readable results than my father's Commodore 64. No wonder that my mother ended up taking over tax preparation.
These days, she purchases the latest edition of TurboTax almost as soon as it's available, but that doesn't stop her from doing my taxes, even if she has to grab my W-2 out of my hands to do so. (So far, not necessary, but I keep this in mind when it comes to what address my electronic checks are 'sent to'.) Having forced herself to prepare all tax forms every year, she is overly-enthusiastic about her self-appointed role, and yet it is a world of easier to let her steal my W-2 and file my takes for me every year, including 2008, when she basically seized them without my explicit permission than to actually do it myself. Drunken with the possibilities offered by basic software wizards, she forced me to itemize my deductions, purely as an experiment, even though the final result was less than a third of my standard deduction, amply confirming my desire to file a 1040EZ in the first place.
coercedbynutmeg would no doubt do a better job checking over my filing, and wisdomeagle would hopefully not flag me for errors. Not that my mother would allow me to do my own taxes in the first places, when she is perfectly capable of using her latest version of TurboTax ....
