thene | (no subject)

-you know I love this doomful weather. When the storms are raging round you, stay right where you are.
-M tells me the tornado sirens went off again in the little hours of last night but he decided he'd only wake me up if it got serious. So yeah, my brain does not know how to wake up when it hears the sirens. GOOD TO KNOW.

-it turned into only about 50hrs of work this week but wow am I tired. and stressed out. I may have to start hating last-minuters on principle - last year my absolute least favourite client showed up on the day before last. Really is just one foot in front of the other at this point, but omg I have tuesday and wednesday off, and two days off in the same week hasn't happened since I went to the UK.
-it isn't even the workload that's been getting to me this week. It's the timeload and, fff, the work is not as stressful as the disorganisation surrounding it. tl;dr I want to sit there and move numbers around, and occasionally waggle bits of paper. I do not want to hear about either my boss's failure to meet her business targets, my boss's debt problems, or my boss's batshit personal life. I need competence.
-I am unsure how, when next year rolls around, to politely seek a different employer. Idk, maybe a nonprofit that provides tax support, like the AARP. One minor complication is the new CPE requirements for preparers, though I'm hoping that anyone who's employing tax preparers is going to be ready to support us re. that.
-I am worried about my two favourite job b coworkers, neither of whom have a fallback job.

-i keep listening to The Wall.
-bugger-all writing this week; energy is like that, I guess. Just a little bit a day helps, given the impending deadline. Right now I am concentrating on setting up the gratuitous and unrequested femslash.

-i just realised the FFEX deadline is two days before the day on which the DHS want me to send them protection money; well, at least the latter is the more anxiety-inducing one of those two things. :/// What they want is for a big pile of money to be mailed to them 90 days before the expiry date on my current residents card (used banknotes preferred) and I am prepared to believe that they won't have a shitfit if we manage it 86 days beforehand instead (which is when we get paid).
-incidentally, it is very reassuring re. the security of the USA that, when they armtwist all immigrants into informing them immediately of changes of address, and I obligingly do so, they are still sending my post to a place I've not lived in a year and a half. THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY IS FUCKING BRILLIANT REALLY. THIS LEVEL OF EXCELLENCE IS WHAT I PAY THEM PROTECTION MONEY FOR.

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I can't help but snerk at you sleeping through the siren.

I admit I waited till the 15th to file. :/ But my parents used to be tax preparers, so they file for me. I was dreading how much I would end up owing, since I still owe from last year, but this year I actually got a refund for the first time ever.

OUR GOVERNMENT IS SO EFFICIENT, IT IS. Wow.

ack, it is easy to end up owing if you've been either a) on unemployment or b) earning mostly tips; there are some people whose hourly pay is just not enough to cover the taxes on their tip income. Or, their withholdings aren't actually being withheld - I've filed for so many restaurant workers whose 'withholdings' are used by their employers to pay cash-in-hand immigrant staff, and therefore never end up on their W2 :///

It is easier to get a refund the year you turn 25 - if you're a low-earner you can claim EIC even without kids! They say everything is changing for next year, though, so who knows if EIC will even last.

trufax, my brother once slept through a bomb attack that was close enough to make our apartment block shake, so I don't feel too ashamed of my brain's reckless LEAVE ME ALONE, SLEEPING NOW laziness.

I've filed for so many restaurant workers whose 'withholdings' are used by their employers to pay cash-in-hand immigrant staff, and therefore never end up on their W2 :///

OMFG I bet that's what happened to me last year. D: We had a lot of people working for us from Brazil/Colombia other assorted Latin American countries, and there was a big ker-fuffle where some of them were hired under the table and/or the employment agency they were hired through was fudging their documents.

I remember one of them was hired back, and he was mad that now he had taxes/SS withheld from his paycheck. :/ And now I work in a place with zero immigrants. And yepper, my dad told me that I'd qualified for EIC. Not surprising since I earned less than 10,000. :///

hahahahaa, nonresidents aren't required to pay into SS and Medicare because they can't claim it (the first time I was here, in 2005, was on a J1 nonresident work visa, so I was in a position to learn this); everyone is required to withhold income taxes though, even undocumented immigrants. (The place I worked tax prep last year had a Spanish-speaking bookkeeper who brought in a lot of trade, and there was this weird cognitive disjunction between the raving Foxtardia of the bosses - no srsly they watched Fox News on the TV we had set up in the creche area - and the fact that they knew a large minority of our clients were undocumented immigrants).

JUST IMAGINE HOW MUCH EASIER IT WOULD BE FOR EVERYONE INVOLVED IF IMMIGRATION WERE LESS STUPID. REALLY. And it hurts my brain that it is common knowledge that restauranteurs do this but there is no recourse for people who are adversely affected by it but who would like to keep their jobs. I guess all the cooks, waiters and so on who are affected don't earn enough money to warrant fair treatment.

So because no one up there gives a shit about us, the general advice is that it's best to log all earnings if you're working in a restaurant, and everyone should keep their last stub of the year, because you can always submit a substitute W2 if you've documented evidence that your W2 is made of bullshit (though obv this may be inadviseable if you like your job. One friend of mine decided once that the answer was 'no' and started reporting her daily tips as zero and then walked out when her crooked employer expressed confusion on this point).

Well, that's good to know. :/ Especially since I want to move to an area that has a large-ish immigrant population. I was all wah last year when I was making almost the exact amount of money as the year before, but I went from owing not very much at all to owing a fucking lot. Like, seriously shocked and dismayed. Especially since at the time I had been unemployed since November and had only just started my craptacular minimum wage job. LOL.