I've been thinking about what I do at work in terms of something La Harlot said the other night, and I thought I'd share it with you. Just in case you have always wondered exactly what it is that I do.
Preparing 1040s is not terribly difficult. They are remarkably similar -- W-2 wages, some interest, some dividends, some stock sales, a few K-1s (reporting their share of the income and expenses from a partnership), maybe a pension or some stock options, deduct some real estate taxes and mortgage interest and contributions, add up how much they have already paid in withholding and/or quarterly estimate payments, and wham!bam!thankyoumam! it's done. Of course, those are the easy-peasey ones; entrepeneurs tend to have much more complicated returns. Expatriates' and really rich people's returns have their own quirks, as do those of the children of the latter.
I have done my share of all of those this year (except the expatriates; we have a whole department that does nothing but those), plus the odd trust return and a handful of gift tax returns. My big headache, though, has been the returns for thirty-plus investment partnerships. The money manager sends us a massive Excel spreadsheet for each partnership with all the information for that partnership and its partners, anywhere from twenty to over three hundred partners per partnership. We import that data into our tax software, tie up a few loose ends, and it's done.
Except of course it isn't quite that easy. The spreadsheet doesn't add across and down because of rounding errors, which we have to find and adjust. The spreadsheet is not in the correct format to import so we have to manipulate it. Some of the columns have to be combined, some have to be split, some have to be created, yada yada. And then, just to make it more fun, every so often we run across something that doesn't make sense, we ask the client about it, and they end up giving us a whole new set of spreadsheets. Rinse and repeat. How many times can they screw it up? Every time, apparently.
Okay, here's the knitting analogy. (You were waiting for that, right? Right.)
It's like knitting a huge lace stole from a series of charts. Cast on 320 stitches, follow the first chart, then the second, and so forth. Except that the charts are written in Tagalog and you have to translate them into English before you can begin. (Yeah, I know that the big advantage of a chart is that it is NOT language dependent; work with here, 'kay?) You get them translated and start knitting. Along the way you discover that whoever wrote the chart was not exactly paying attention, and there are a number of random errors, which you have to catch and correct before you can proceed. If you miss one, you will find it a few [hundred] rows later and have to frog back to correct it, so you pay very close attention, so close that your brow furrows and your shoulders hunch and your lower back feels like the roots of a pot-bound cactus.
But you persevere and knit all the way to the end of the first chart... whereupon you are told that that was the wrong chart and you have to start over.
The new chart, instead of being written in Tagalog, in which you are now a bit of an expert, is written in Xhosa with footnotes in Urdu, and besides, now you are behind schedule and thus have to work even faster/harder/smarter to catch up. Knit, knit, knit, from 8:30am until 10pm, with a couple breaks for coffee and quick meals and to run to the printer and the bathroom and maybe to whip out a 1040-- , er, a scarf, or two; go home, come back tomorrow, and do it again. Endlessly. Because the charts and stoles, they just keep a-comin'.
Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of other knitters waiting for you to finish these stoles. Unlike a real knitted piece, when finished your stole will be magically broken apart into hundreds of tiny pieces that will then become parts of other knitters' stoles. They cannot knit their stoles until yours is done and blocked and dried and checked for dropped stitches and missed yarn-overs. All those other knitters are trying to be polite and not bother you, but you can feel the pressure of their impatience. Once in while one will ask, "How's it going? Are you getting close?" and you bite off their tiny head because you Just. Can't. Help. It.
And that's why I may not be blogging much for awhile. The jailers tell me there is no internet access in the cells reserved for homicide suspects, and besides, it's really hard to type when wearing a straight jacket...
