Tax relax

My husband and I got a call from our H&R Block agent today, letting us know that she was done with our taxes and it was all over except for the signing. We zoomed in to the office and signed our names and all was done. We were so super-lucky this year -- our income went down and so we didn't owe anything! Everybody say BOOOOYAH!

H&R Block is hideously expensive, it really is. But we fled to them in a time of storm, after owing the IRS and the State of Indiana about $4,000 in taxes. We owed this money because we were using a popular do-your-taxes-at-home software and as it turns out, if you make typing errors when keying in alllllll your many numbers, you can wind up with figures that don't jibe with the ones calculated by the revenuuuuuuuers.

I really don't know where we went wrong. Many's the happy hour my husband and I spent, crouched uncomfortably together in front of our keyboard and monitor, him reciting numbers off all the forms, me typing. Come to think of it, that may be where we went wrong: I am not noted for my accuracy in typing, having once addressed the director of educational programming at the Indiana State Museum as "Tuna" instead of "Tina" in an email I sent her to confirm a field trip date. There should be a special stint in Purgatory for the person who put the i and u keys so close together on the keyboard.

The IRS found some mistakes in that current year's tax returns, which of course made them go back and re-figure the last year's tax returns and then the year before that and the year before that. Then they tattled on us to Indiana, who started doing their own re-calculations. By the time they all got finished, we owed, as I stated before, around $4,000.

Strangely enough, they never offered us any money back for any mistakes in our favor we might have made. I'm sure that ALL the mistakes we made didn't benefit our federal and state governments. I'm not that bad at typing.