Today is the nearly universally dreaded "Tax Day" here in the Land of Unlimited Opportunities, where rarely is heard a Discouraging Word, and the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day. How all of that gets reduced to the USA always amazes me, but I chalk it up to a triumph of marketing and branding.
Speaking of which, how'd you like to tell folks that you work for the Internal Revenue Service (or did until Elmo and the Muskrats chainsawed your organization)? Don't be like that! Somebody has to! And tens of thousands of people do, and despite our muttered imprecations and seriously intended aspersions cast without the benefit of a net, they do what they are charged to do what Oliver Wendall Holmes once eloquently described, though it was probably pre-audit.Point in fact, we pay taxes every day. And every year we file a return to see if we are to get back some of our own money. I remember my wife filing her taxes in Germany when we lived there, and she rarely saw any money returned to her. I often thought that because her husband was such a sonderangebot, her government saw no reason to bless her twice. Strangely, I never got around to mentioning that theory to her when we lived in her country.
Like you, in all probability, I've filed my taxes already. Do I grumble? Of course I do, and anyone who tells you s/he doesn't grumble is a liar. To borrow from a dulcet-toned former colleague, who once observed with some acerbity, "Taxes and Texas, they have the same letters but only one can go to Hell."
-bill kenny
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