Bad Habits - Pulp fact - April 29 2004
Shredded on the paper trail
Holy schmoly, having a baby pays off big at tax time. The government, which is normally pretty stingy, lets loose the purse strings and practically throws money at you. Just for having a baby! Does the government not know that just about anybody can do that?
Maybe it's a congratulation for having copulated at least once. Or condolences for loss of sanity: Your mind will soon be gone, so here, have a few bucks. Well, more like thousands of dollars. And that's nothing to sniff at. That's easily the cost of a canister of formula. It almost makes me sad that I only have one. Almost.
I filed my taxes online this year because I have some sort of paperwork disability that renders me unable to fill out forms. I just end up shuffling the papers around into different piles over and over until my sweaty palms cause the pages to turn back to pulp.
I'm a masochist, so I still attempted a paper version of my taxes. It took two hours of rifling through various booklets and forms just to fill out my name and address. Afterward, I looked like I'd been body-checked by a newspaper truck. My face was smudged black with newsprint, my hair had puffed up, and I was surrounded by wads of crumpled paper. My 1099s were on the verge of dissolving from all the pointless handling, and I'd managed to lose a sock.
Wads of crumpled paper are no good these days, as that's precisely what the baby wants to eat: books, magazines, envelopes, bags, my tax forms. When I finished ciphering for the feds and realized I'd have to go mail the thing, I called it quits. That would clearly involve more paper: photo copies, envelopes, manila folders, stamps, state forms. Where would it end? Would I wreck on the way to the post office and have to have my car serviced, only to have them use one of those paper mats that keeps your car from getting all schmutzed up?
Where the hell was my paperless society? I was promised a paperless society, dammit. I never fell for that flying car bullshit, but I believed in the paperless society. Sitting there surrounded by old magazines, half-chewed glops of baby-chewed paper towel and gummed mail, I could see it was a long way off. Still, I took advantage of what we have: a do-it-online-and-print-a-copy-for-your-own-records society.
This is a long way to come for someone who put off direct deposit for three years because she couldn't say goodbye to the romance of the paper check. Oh, the smooth, cool feel of a check with my name on it. And, ah, the prickly perforated edges — I love how they tickle. But nowadays, it's zippity-zap. Payments shoot hither and yon with a flick of the wrist. And I wouldn't trade the convenience for a big pile of cash. If they still even make cash.
My e-file coup made me prematurely nostalgic. Would paper be gone soon? I hurried over to the paper museum at Georgia Tech. That's where I fell down the rabbit hole. Turns out one of the first uses of paper was to keep records of taxes. A '70s-era video on paper processing not only wowed me with the thrill of paper manufacturing, but stunned me because it was quite obviously narrated by Lois Reitzes of WABE-FM (90.1), a contribution to which I'd just written off on my taxes. Still, on a nearby wall was a photo of some paper-milling Beloit Corp. machinery. What are the odds that yours truly has been to Beloit, Wis.? My boyfriend, who is often quite taxing, went to school there.
Anyway, turns out the Chinese are the ones who invented paper. So, think of them when you're filling out your forms. I'll take this opportunity to thank them for the fact that I have a job. Unless you're reading this online. Then I say, print a copy and save it. It just may be worth the paper it's printed on. But my tax refund? You can bet an outdated dollar it's coming electronically.