Tag Archives: Internal Revenue Service

PAD 3/7/2013 – Seven Days

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You wake up tomorrow morning to find all your plans have been cancelled for the next seven days and $10,000 on your dresser. Tell us about your week.

I drive all over town and make multiple $999.99 deposits so as to not trip off the IRS tripwires that are always in place whenever anyone toys around with a surprise amount of cash all of a sudden. I like the money, don’t want to go to jail for it.

I would drive down to my credit union and pay off my car. I’d take the remains of the money and issue a hefty payment against my highest-balance credit card. I’d reserve $100 and use it to buy some of the things that I rarely get to have and enjoy them in the quiet of my own home.

The majesty of a endebted American. Hah.

Friday Flashback – March 8th

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2004 – I got my IRS return back from the Feds, $1700, a part of that went to GenCon. Boy, were those the days. Since GenCon went to Indianapolis, and I don’t travel through Indiana unless driven by a myrddraal, that won’t be happening again. Some funny Andy-abuses-popsong-lyrics humor and the almost daily work issues, which at this point are at the focus where irritation and cliché meet. Moving along…

2006 – The big thing on this day was Project Runway was concluded. The most important bit from this show happened this year, “Where’s Andre?” Yes. Where.

2007 – Owning an American Made Car made the headlines on this day. Getting screwed over by General Motors makes 2013 a laugh-fest. We saved GM, Quist-ler, and Ford. Oh hooray. $1200 for replacement bearings and fourth set of brakes. It’s one of the reasons why I’ll never own another American made piece of shit car again. American auto companies can fail – hah – or not. wry smile The start of my debt was this awful car, one small little golden brick of it at least.

2009 – The beginning of the end for my odd benign cyst that was on my leg for years and years and years. This was when that whole thing started on the path to the end. Now I’m delightfully symmetrical and ever so daintily scarred. In the movies? Watchmen. Those were the days.

2010 – Wireless carriers still mattered. Sprint was good for highways, Verizon was slow but everywhere and AT&T was shit. This also was when AT&T bought Centennial wireless. So, whatever. Little did these carriers know but they were on the path to becoming commodity carriers. Nobody cares about their products or their employees, just their towers. In other news, I was hopeful that La Palma would break off, hit the ocean and several hours later erase New York City with a megatsunami. Alas, my hopes were for naught. New York City still exists. Blah. I started to blog and lauded how I could link dump automatically on Twitter and Facebook. Yeah, social networks as whores, take it bitches. It was at this point I realized that Apple Sales are whores. If you approach them and jingle money at them, they’ll do anything for you, but after the sale? You’re full of Santorum and the beer goggles have worn off. I also wished for Fax Machines to disappear. I didn’t get my wish.

2011 – A bit of Sage love as an email brought me great joy. I still thought Daniel Tosh was pretty neat, before the rape jokes and general wretchedness set in. WMU rolled out the Bronco Transit Mobile GPS and I thought it was neat, then I stopped using the system. I started thinking about how awkward it must be for Christians when Easter isn’t a fixed date but based off a calculation on the moon after the vernal equinox, lulz. Extra special work-fun and I started talking about AES–256 and how smart people look it up and take advantage of it.

2013 – Reality TV and Contest TV kind of suck. I decided to make a change to what I do at home, after dinner and cleanup are done. A very old friend and I shared a special moment, but they have no idea because it was just a dream. My daily tarot card readings pretty much jive with my horoscopes and so, I do my best to not go all “Hulk Angry/Hulk Smash”. I dealt with work issues, did things I’m not proud of, found FBackup which was okay, and generally felt that the day was best forgotten. I laughed heartily at the foibles of folken, they don’t, so I do, and it doesn’t matter. Well, it matters to me, which is why I do it. What is it? Ah, yes. Work stuff… you’ll never be knowing. Trust Issues. Dangly Bits. LOL.

Waiting is the hardest part

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Waiting for Verizon. It’s the hardest part of my February so far. For those who have been keeping track, the IRS came and tried to strangle our wireless infrastructure to death, but apparently failed. I’ve been on-again-off-again with Verizon but now we’re firmly on-again. I’ve sent neatly wrapped missives to management but have yet to hear any response.

All of this would be maddening if Verizon was ready. Thankfully it isn’t maddening because Verizon isn’t ready. In fact, from what I’ve seen from my local Verizon sales rep, they don’t even have a vocabulary yet, let alone any plans or packages for sale. So while I struggle with this nominal Blackberry, I watch the time tick away waiting for Verizon to get off their duff and give us details on plans. Then I can take that information to management and maybe goose them into action.

Last night was a problem because I couldn’t make an outbound call with my minimally acceptable Sprint service on my Blackberry. I had to turn off Automatic Roaming, go up to the upper level of my house where I could get the weakest of signals and make a call to order pizza for dinner. Sprint’s network is wretchedly bad, and it almost never was the case before.

I haven’t the heart to call Sprint and tell them what I’m planning. So far all they know is that the IRS is likely going to be the reason why we close our contract. It’s a total straw-man, and as far as today, a rather nifty fabrication. The last time I told them I was contemplating leaving Sprint for Verizon they sent my sales rep, a VP of sales, and a third fellow who had the word “synergy” in his title, or something to that effect. Truth to be told, I don’t have a problem with my Sprint sales rep, or the VP of sales that came to visit, but that third guy was aggressive, abrasive, and thoroughly an unpleasant human being. If Sprint ever gets around to thinking about why they lost my business they can look no further than this third-man they brought with them. Leaving him in his cubicle may be the best move for their future business, if they have any after Verizon poaches every single one of their customers.

I couldn’t properly express to Sprint exactly why the iPhone on Verizon was so compelling. They kept on pushing Android on their network — Are you serious? Verizon is a double-dunk. The device has pretty much already sold me. The Verizon network is the other half of the power-shot and the fact that Verizon is willing to drop the pretense and become a commodity wireless service vendor means the biggest fear I had about the iPhone on Verizon went up in smoke. They aren’t going to nail it down, cover it with obnoxious Verizon “VZ” bullshit, they are going to simply put the device on their network and let the chips fall where they may.

This is like a hat-trick from heaven. Sprint pre-occupied with an IRS straw-man, iPhone on Verizon, and Verizon keeping their ugly branding out of the pot. Bam Bam BAM! If anyone wants to know why, that’s why. A hat-trick.

Now if only Verizon would get back to me… tick tock tick tock gentlemen!

Hamster Wheel

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A week ago a policy was sent which indicated that the IRS was effectively going to strangle the life out of our wireless infrastructure. Yesterday afternoon I learned that while the policy may be published, it was an error that it was sent out and the brouhaha that it caused was a mistake.

I talked it over with my boss and I commented that the only information I had to act on was the policy sent down and I didn’t have any other guidance. I had sent an email to management but never got a reply. Then my boss told me that sometimes not hearing an answer is an answer – and it hit me – a line right out of Serendipity, one of the best lines that Jeremy Piven’s character Dean Kansky said “So the absence of a sign, is a sign!?!.. They should make pills for this…” hit me and I had to suppress a serious case of the giggles.

So after talking with management, which is apparently dominated by the doppler effect, in so far that the words I hear are modulated by pitch changes as they rush away to another meeting, I got what I was after, which was an ounce of clarification.

So the policy exists and we are moving ahead with a wireless infrastructure. I contacted our Verizon rep and placed the toy train back on the tracks after so violently derailing it earlier and set the track power to maximum so we could catch up. Just as much as we don’t know exactly how we’re going to approach our wireless infrastructure, Verizon doesn’t know how they are going to handle our contract, at least yet. I bet when we make decisions, that will oddly be the same moment that Verizon makes it’s decisions. I suspect we’ll have a bumper crop of Kismet coming down the pike.