April 15

(Photo courtesy petranorris.com)

After the craziness of taxes back in February followed by almost no calls in March and the first week and a half of April, I guess I naively started thinking that taxes were going to go out with a whimper instead of a bang.

Silly me.

I definitely underestimated how prone to last-minuteness people are.

Sidenote: Yes, I know I am a huge procrastinator myself. But one would think that if you know the entire COUNTRY has the same deadline for something, you might assume things are gonna get busy and act accordingly...

But oh well.

Starting about April 13 and through mid-afternoon on the 15th, our voicemail box started to get flooded with calls from people needing tax appointments.

At first we did what we always do -- referred people to Ohio Benefit Bank sites nearest to their zip codes.

But then we started getting calls back saying the places we'd referred them to were full and not taking any more appointments.

At that point, we decided that, since our schedules are probably more flexible than most OBB sites, it might be easier to just start taking the appointments ourselves and spread around the burden a little bit from our overworked non-profits.

However, fellow VISTA Maureen and I (stupidly?) had planned to be out of town on April 15 at an event in Wood County.

In the end, we decided it didn't make sense for both of us to go. We agreed she would go to the event alone and I would stay behind in Toledo and offer myself as a last-minute resource for tax filing.

After returning all the messages, I started thinking it wasn't going to be as bad as I thought. A couple just had questions and several had already found an appointment elsewhere (hopefully not a paid service...).

On the morning of the 15th, I only had one appointment: plans to meet my first client at 10 am at a library near his home in South Toledo. I thought it might have been a waste for me to stay behind.

The South Branch Library.

But as the day went on, I got one call, and then another, then another, and I ended up working straight through until 10pm, filing taxes for 7.5 families.(The 0.5 comes from the family who got halfway through before I discovered they owed rental properties, which the OBB does not support...crap.)



I ended up parking myself all day at that same little table at the library where I had my first appointment, doing clients until the library closed at 530 pm.

After the library closed, I picked up and moved down the street to a McDonalds and did two more clients there.



Then I finally moved out of South Toledo for the frist time that day to a coffee shop, where I met one more client before the night was out.



It somehow worked out that everyone who called happened to be just down the street or knew right where I was, so I wasn't wasting time running all over town, tearing down and setting up up my laptop and printer. Everyone just came to me.

As one client said, "Do you believe in providence?"

Even though it was the last day of taxes, I still had some firsts: first person interested in doing back taxes, first person with a spouse in prison (does 20 years count as "temporarily absent" from your home? haha), and -- oddest of all -- first person who didn't want to claim her children as dependents.

Well, technically, she couldn't claim them, because she lost their social security numbers, but she said she hadn't claimed them for years. Something about her refund getting was going to be eaten by student loan debt anyway, so she wanted to give the goverment as little as possible. Which doesn't make sense, since she'll have to pay it off someday somehow anyway. I tried to explain how much better it would be for her to claim her children. How most people joke about trying to claim dogs, cats, etc. But she insisted she didn't want to, hasn't for years, and I should just send it along. Ugh. It pained me to do so, but she is the boss. Sigh.

I finally made it home long after dark with tired eyes and a dull brain. But with a good feeling about a productive day.

I collpased into bed and took the next day off.