Emily and I got our taxes done on Tuesday (Status: Married, Filing Jointly). While at the appointment with our accountant who, like all accountants, is named Gary, I was in a strange mood that led to me doing things that were kind of annoying to Emily. While it didn’t lead to a new status (Married, Filing Separately), we did have a good talk on the way home about how financial things make us both tense for some reason, most likely because there’s money involved.

Gary crunched the numbers and pushed buttons on his computer and adding machine at the same time, proving his dexterity on a variety of non-musical keyboards. He came up with a number, though, that gave Emily and I pause, because it
1. Was an unexpected amount, and
2. Involved money (see above for how that goes)

Anyway, Gary, our dexterious (not a real word) accountant said, in very account-y* terms, “you should get a refund of ____________”, a number whose lowness led to our surprise. I should probably clarify for the reader that indeed Gary said an actual number and not just an underlined pause as it looks above, an actual number which was significantly lower than what we expected. Less money back is bad for many reasons, but for us it is bad because we need to make some adjustments to our house involving putting windows in square holes that are currently filled with something that once resembled windows. Some of our lighty-works (windows) are bad enough that the neighborhood birds refuse to fly into them and “pretend” that they didn’t know it was a window. This disappoints our cat.

Let me pause here and say that the whole point of this story is this: The best question you could ever ask your accountant is “Are you sure”?

We didn’t know this at the time, but when we asked Gary “Are you sure?”, his answer was a breath of fresh air. “No”, he declared, and immediately bared down and started crunching numbers and asking questions of his fellow accountant pals, the kind of people that probably know a few jokes about carrying the 9 and knock-knock jokes involving an IRS auditor and a 1040 form; this humor is above me because accountants know things I don’t. One example is the filling out of tax forms.

Long story short, it turns out that our number (“______”) was actually quite a bit more, which I will indicate using a math-like problem below:

Are You Sure = (“________”) x 4.2 = New LightyWorks = Birds Flying Into Window

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Davidson, R. Adam Words I Made Up on Tuesday