LESBIAN PAPERWORK

[thene]

i promise that none of you hate DOMA as much as i do right now. my work computer crashed at 11.30pm. and then i stared at all the bits of paper and realised i had no idea where to put any of them and suffered a terminal no fucks error and went home.

Comments

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

Paper only has one sex, so I get how it can be lesbian. But how the hell can it be heterosexual? What's the second gender?

[thene]

The paper has people on it, and (much like opinions! as I like to say), most people have a gender. DOMA says that lesbians must have three times as much paperwork. I am at least cheering myself with the thought of conservative tax preparers in borderline DOMA-affected states like Iowa or Maryland crying at their desks over the conflict between their kooky DOMA-supporting religious beliefs and their professional need to drag DOMA out the back and stab it to death.

ETA; just to explain more about how this works - most Americans file both a federal tax return and a state tax return. (The exceptions being (mostly) people who live in a state with no state income tax). Married couples are supposed to both file on the same form, and pay an increased tax rate if they don't. There is all kinds of drama about whether this is a good or bad idea - it is definitely stupid in terms of data, as the IRS relies on the Social Security Administration database to confirm who people really are, and the SSA keep no records on whether people are or are not married - that's handled by state governments. (So the most common & basic form of tax fraud is simply people lying about their marital status to claim some form of advantage. I feel like the incentive to be dishonest about one's family life may be the worst aspect of it, socially.)

DOMA makes this much stupider because it's created a class of people whose marriages are recognised by their home state's tax department but not by the IRS.

Obvious contributory factor; any piece of software is going to be at its most user-friendly and robust when being used the way most people use it, declining in quality down the obscurity line. This is DISTINCTLY true of tax software; the more arcane the issue, the more your software will wage war on you as you go. State filing software is always going to be weaker than federal as every user of the program will be using the federal part of it, but only a small portion will be using each individual state package. DOMA now affects something like 9 states but they're none of them huge ones - Massachusetts may be the largest in terms of population, I forget. So, there is never a magic button you can press to make the data in front of you array itself in the fashion you require. Instead, you have to create two sets of data (one for each lesbian), manually remove the state, send each to the IRS, then merge them by adding the first lesbian to the second lesbian's data, re-create the state(s) and turn off the federal file, and then fight the software when it tries to tell you that you've duplicated an existing return because, yes, you know, you did it on purpose because lesbians. If they've lived in more than one state in the last year, some of which recognise their marriage and some don't, well HAVE FUN. They have children? MORE FUN.

I didn't even have to do all this - I was just there late verifying that someone else had done it right, and my computer gave up and so did I.

[1000kindsofrain.wordpress.com]

I think you took my surreal speculation way too seriously (and in the process failed your geek test). The correct response was to suggest that paper uses a modified haplodiploid sex-determination system: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_system) clearly a single sheet of paper is a haploid female (or a sterile worker female?); two sheets joined by carbon paper are male; additional genders are assigned to bigger paper/carbon-paper sandwiches (with the maximum possible be the "queen"?). The first stage of reproduction is fission (meiosis) into the haploid gender. The puzzle is how do haploid forms become polyploid? We know they form vast steel and concrete nests, and that only a few succeed in building these, but how does a haploid sheet of paper manage that? Does lesbianism play a significant role in this process? To what extent is paper truly eusocial? And why do these nests then produce jigsaw puzzles? I need a research grant.

As to the rest. Human are expendable slaves; computers are fragile and have to be protected.

And, in the most serious point of the entire comment, many programmers would willingly build a system where a single button is able to cope with child-rearing lesbians who have lived in multiple states, while requiring many buttons pushes for more common cases. Managers exist to enforce the behaviour you observe. There will be a Dilbert strip or an XKCD cartoon that makes this opaque.

[lynx]

The "lesbian" part puzzles me.

I'm sad this happened to you :C Try to look at it on the bright side. Maybe you needed the break?

[thene]

Because of DOMA, there are tax consequences from same-sex marriage being recognised by state but not federal government. Lesbians :( and hahahaha yes, I was seriously out of brain for the day by then.

[sheikah]

I am sorry your computer crashed but I am soooo stealing the term "terminal no fucks error."

[thene]

I WASN'T SORRY, I JUST FUCKED RIGHT OFF HOME

TAKE IT

[khronos_keeper]

I like how even the software associated with our tax system is just as implicitly bigoted and unworkable as the actual system. Fun!

I approve of your method of handling it.