I hate paperwork…

There is one of those Big Storms going on outside my window today. It’s an unusual storm for this time year – usually, rain-wise, October “storms” in my neck of the woods are, you know, a drizzle of rain, maybe a quarter inch all told.

WIND, on the other hand – wind, we get in spades. It’s not unusual, in October, to have fences and trees falling down all over town, your patio furniture ending up all the way across the yard, things like that.

But this storm is packing those big winds and a real, honest-to-goodness soaking kind of rain. They’re predicting up to two inches in a six hour period, which has a lot of us pretty nervous – the trees haven’t lost many leaves yet, which means that they make great push-toys for the wind as it is. NOW add in a sudden, thorough soaking of the ground and the toppling could be epic.

Now ordinarily on a day like this, I’d like to be curled up in my chair with a hot pot of tea and a knitting project.

But oooooooooooh no. Not today! Because today, I have to deal with all the paperwork that has been piling up on my desk these last few days OK, weeks.

The tax board claims I didn’t pay my sales taxes – which I did, too. But instead of just saying, “Did too!” and having that be sufficient to punt the ball back into their ‘couldn’t find their own backsides with both hands and a road map’ court, I’ve got to scan and fax and email and snail mail whackity-majillion things proving that they DID. TOO!!!! take five whole dollars via EFT from my business checking account.

That’s right. They’re threatening me with Doom and Dire Consequences over five. measly. bucks.

Last of the big-time operators, that’s me. (Although I do wonder if it isn’t that they didn’t receive my return, but rather that they don’t believe my return. “Surely that’s missing a zero or two, right?” they are saying to each other around the office. “Yeah, gotta be missing a zero or two – hit her with the delinquent notice and get that other $495 from her…”)

I’ve got $780 in medical bills waiting to be paid for services ranging from well-child checkups to ear infection checks to whaddya know, it WAS an ear infection after all!. I’ve got reimbursement paperwork to be submitted to the husband’s new client for transportation expenses. I’ve got contracts that need to be renewed (or not). I’ve got insurance forms filtering in for general and professional liability insurance – you know, in case our coding brings down the entire global banking system or something?

…I only wish we had the kinds of gigs that could theoretically do something that big… “Now, do you want this data input form to be the dark blue, or the gray blue…”

I’ve got enrollment paperwork for the 4H, permission slips, reminders about movies and luncheons and field trips and network policies at the school.

And, of course, I still have to enter the sales from Witchapalooza into my accounting software – all five of them. (Kidding! There were eleven!)

Worst of all, once I dig down to the rockbed, guess what? It’ll be time to trundle all those packages and payments and whatnot down to the mail drop – where I will also have to pick up the mail that has come in.

Whaddya wanna bet the box will be stuffed with things like Chamber of Commerce forms, inquiries from the state about our payroll, demands from assorted charities to give them money or be a very bad person indeed and a business with no community spirit (I’m just waiting for them to start threatening to publish not the names of donors, but the names of non-donors. The ‘be a good corporate neighbor’ pitches are getting pretty intense around here…), overdue notices from people I did actually pay and so forth and so on.

However, there should also be a check in there from one of our clients for his September invoice, so, you know…it ain’t all bad…

(Just really not feeling the love for this today…which is part of the problem, of course, because you can only decide to put this stuff off ‘one more day’ so many times before it turns into what it turned into, which is a kind of man-eating paper dragon sprawled out all over every flat surface in the Den of Chaos, through which we wade like desperate adventurers trying to escape the Anaconda of Technicality Death…file by no later than October 12; requests received after October 12 will not be processed…@^&@*^&@!!!!!!!