Mailboxes, etc.
Mar. 3rd, 2008 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfield"The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination."
- Ronald Reagan (U.S. President, Actor, Rhetorical Destroyer of Walls)
Last week I completed my taxes. I owed money to my federal and state governments, as I usually do, because (a) I do not have a mortgage or any other deductible debt, and (b) I do not voluntarily withhold very much from my regular paycheck. (Avoidance of withholding, with regard to financial as well as interpersonal and therapuarrangements, is one of my defining principles.)
The tax accounting software I use offers me the option of electronically filing my taxes, for a fee of $17.95. I'm not sure to whom or what this fee goes, and being faced with the prospect of paying a sizeable sum to the government, I am reluctant to part with even this comparably paltry (and clearly opportunistic) charge.
So I sealed up my returns and checks old-world style, in a traditional envelope. (One of these days I'm going to enclose my return with a greeting card -- nothing subversive or anything, something cheery like a Ziggy (R) card or a card with babies and kittens on it -- just to cheer up those poor people at the U.S. Treasury processing plant, spending their spring and summer tearing open little sacks of people's misery and sacrifice. You can't tell me it doesn't get to them.)
Anyway, so I had my returns ready to mail, and I carried them around with me for a few days waiting for the right mailing opportunity. I get nervous when I have to mail something really important, because I'm afraid that there's going to be some kind of mailbox malfunction, where the letter is accidentally going to get stuck in the nook of some structurally deficient mail receptacle and the average lackadaisical letter carrier would never be motivated or curious enough to tap it or reach into it or even give a cursory glance to see if he collected all the outgoing mail. And it would sit there forever, until the end of postal time, or until some other sender miraculously dislodges it while remitting his latest Netflix. And of course nobody can know which mailboxes are internally defective, so I instinctually distrust all of them.
Fortunately, at the end of last week I had to make a special trip to the Post Office to mail a delinquent gift to Scotland (Happy Birthday, Andrew!), presenting me with the perfect opportunity to get my mail to a trusted and reliable source. Or so I thought.
First of all, for some reason the post office has about six identical big blue mailboxes just outside the main service area, all of which have the same pick-up times and bear no distinctive markings for first-class mail or international mail or strangely shaped mail or whatever. Then there are those vaguely creepy looking slots in the lobby itself, which for all I know lead to a dark and abandoned room where my precious letters would softly float to the ground and slide under a filing cabinet or something, lost to some bureaucratic vortex of Mail That Never Was. Or of course I could have given it to the clerk who was handling my international parcel, except that the area behind her looked like a scale-model recreation of Hurricane Andrew, with crap everywhere, not to mention the fact that after waiting in line for a half-hour I was not exactly brimming with confidence about the postal staff's organizational aptitude.
Luckily for me, the collection time for the big blue mailboxes coincided perfectly with my completed international transaction, and I was able to give my vouchsafed cargo directly to the letter carrier himself. Now I only have to worry that it doesn't get stuck in his bin or lost in his truck or fall out of his sack or something.
It's nice to see my tax dollars at work.
- Ronald Reagan (U.S. President, Actor, Rhetorical Destroyer of Walls)
Last week I completed my taxes. I owed money to my federal and state governments, as I usually do, because (a) I do not have a mortgage or any other deductible debt, and (b) I do not voluntarily withhold very much from my regular paycheck. (Avoidance of withholding, with regard to financial as well as interpersonal and therapuarrangements, is one of my defining principles.)
The tax accounting software I use offers me the option of electronically filing my taxes, for a fee of $17.95. I'm not sure to whom or what this fee goes, and being faced with the prospect of paying a sizeable sum to the government, I am reluctant to part with even this comparably paltry (and clearly opportunistic) charge.
So I sealed up my returns and checks old-world style, in a traditional envelope. (One of these days I'm going to enclose my return with a greeting card -- nothing subversive or anything, something cheery like a Ziggy (R) card or a card with babies and kittens on it -- just to cheer up those poor people at the U.S. Treasury processing plant, spending their spring and summer tearing open little sacks of people's misery and sacrifice. You can't tell me it doesn't get to them.)
Anyway, so I had my returns ready to mail, and I carried them around with me for a few days waiting for the right mailing opportunity. I get nervous when I have to mail something really important, because I'm afraid that there's going to be some kind of mailbox malfunction, where the letter is accidentally going to get stuck in the nook of some structurally deficient mail receptacle and the average lackadaisical letter carrier would never be motivated or curious enough to tap it or reach into it or even give a cursory glance to see if he collected all the outgoing mail. And it would sit there forever, until the end of postal time, or until some other sender miraculously dislodges it while remitting his latest Netflix. And of course nobody can know which mailboxes are internally defective, so I instinctually distrust all of them.
Fortunately, at the end of last week I had to make a special trip to the Post Office to mail a delinquent gift to Scotland (Happy Birthday, Andrew!), presenting me with the perfect opportunity to get my mail to a trusted and reliable source. Or so I thought.
First of all, for some reason the post office has about six identical big blue mailboxes just outside the main service area, all of which have the same pick-up times and bear no distinctive markings for first-class mail or international mail or strangely shaped mail or whatever. Then there are those vaguely creepy looking slots in the lobby itself, which for all I know lead to a dark and abandoned room where my precious letters would softly float to the ground and slide under a filing cabinet or something, lost to some bureaucratic vortex of Mail That Never Was. Or of course I could have given it to the clerk who was handling my international parcel, except that the area behind her looked like a scale-model recreation of Hurricane Andrew, with crap everywhere, not to mention the fact that after waiting in line for a half-hour I was not exactly brimming with confidence about the postal staff's organizational aptitude.
Luckily for me, the collection time for the big blue mailboxes coincided perfectly with my completed international transaction, and I was able to give my vouchsafed cargo directly to the letter carrier himself. Now I only have to worry that it doesn't get stuck in his bin or lost in his truck or fall out of his sack or something.
It's nice to see my tax dollars at work.
