Two Things are Needed...

The “eye” was needed but wrongly used!

Yes, two things are needed and no, one of the things is not coffee, though I have set myself up with one as I’m writing this morning, and it is sooo good, French Vanilla ooooohhh.

There are two things I find difficult and troubling, they are promotions and financial record keeping. I have to confess, I know it's late but I finally got my financial stuff together for the tax man. And that was only after a lot of polite calls from my accountant, and one from Canada Revenue! My accountant was very polite in how he used several techniques in encouraging me to get it done. First, there were the many reminders of the reality of the fines that would be levied against me for being late. Secondly, he tried using shame, for as time went on he kept calling and I’d try to avoid answering. I’d convince myself I could not take the call because I was busy doing something important, you know, watering flowers or something important of like that. Shame though worked a little better, his calls and hearing others talking about how they had already done their taxes worked some but not enough to get me into action.

Somehow the shame and the small percentage he was suggesting I’d be charged by the government seemed by far less painful than working for hours, looking for seemingly non-existent forms, filling in a spreadsheets and doing the extensions, filling in amounts I’d paid, amounts I’d received, from who and for what, list upon list, and then there were those terrible, horrible small crumpled pieces of paper called receipts that had to be recorded. These had to be straightened out, (I was considering a steam iron but my wife would not hear of it!) to decipher what exactly it was saying, but also one had to remember what in the world the purchase had been about. Hey it was over a year ago, how can one remember that far back?

Finally, two things happened. First I got a call from an official in the tax department asking if I had filed and wondered why not. OK, that did it. Now it was not the government but an actual person I’d offended and that moved me. Weird! Shame definitely took over. Secondly, we got a call from our accountant and he reminded me that their special tax computer which calculates your taxes in one hundred thousand ways to get you the best results possible was going to be shut down at the end of this week to be re-programmed for next year’s tax season and the new rules the government had enacted. So if we could get ours in before that it would of course be to our advantage. Well, since we were now going to be fined a “small percentage” for being late we needed this computer to get the lowest tax bill possible! Now I was motivated. Weird! So, we, my wonderful long-suffering wife and I decided that it just had to get done. So we set Thursday as our our deadline date and went at it.

Have you ever noticed how interruptions increase as your deadlines increase? We only had three days to do this and right away our phones burst into life. Then I suddenly had to meet a staffer, also I had to take care of several appointments that had been made earlier and could not be moved, even the door-bell began ringing... Wow.

But, when our friendly accountant arrived Thursday night at seven pm, we were ready - sort of, in a way! We were bleary eyed, riled up, wired, tense, tired and frustrated and did I mention bleary eyed? When he came through the door we warned him of our fragile state, but he seemed oblivious to it all. How ready were we? He had to set up beside my computer and scroll through my spreadsheet to copy the information onto his. And our forms, well they were all in piles on the dining room table, on the couch, coffee table...he was very gracious and understanding and amazingly calm. What took me hours to do, he did in seconds. His fingers just blazed over the numbers keyboard! He just glanced at forms and understood them completely. How in the world is such a thing possible? It’s simply amazing and disgusting all at the same time. Can you believe it took him two and half hours at our house and he was done! That included jokes, taking a break, stories and of course entering our data!

After all that it certainly helped and eased the pain (a little) to hear that our tax bill would be lower than we expected.

It’s Saturday morning as I write this and we are still recovering! One of the two things needed had been done. What a relief!

“The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you,” or the head to the feet, “I don’t need you.”

1 Cor. 12:21