rant rant taxes rant.
2009-03-20/11:24 a.m.

I did my taxes yesterday. I had like 3 or 4 hours to kill before meeting up with a friend to go shopping and I thought I should just get them out of the way. I used turbo tax online last year so I figured I'd use it again.

Almost 4 hours in I was done with federal and both states. (sidenote- for the first time ever i owed money in NYC. At first it was nearly 2k but when I said I was only a resident for half the year it dropped to 500... whew! Basically, I made way more from unemployment than I realized. I love unemployment though, so I can't complain.)

I paid for the federal and both states. Another sidenote- turbotax claims to be "free" and yet my total came to $86. UGH! Free, my butt. I also paid the NYC taxes owed. Then I got an error saying I couldn't process my taxes because of some form on the CA one not being filled out properly. The form wasn't filled out at all because it was a form that I don't need. It was a form I needed in '07 but not this year and never started so it was just some kind of glitch. It would not let me pass it by so I had to call customer support.

Customer support was a dude named Patrick who tried a few things and then told me that the best thing would be to erase everything and start from scratch. WHAT?! Yeah, start my taxes over after I'm totally done. Not going to happen. He was extremely unhelpful and kept putting me on hold. At this point the time for shopping had come and gone and Kelly was waiting to hear from me. Finally, we just canceled.

I asked for a supervisor and the supervisor informed me that Patrick was wrong anyway because once you pay, you can't erase everything and start from scratch. So for 45 minutes I was being told nothing that would help me anyway. The supervisor said he had to send me the downloadable turbo tax and fix it that way. He was a total ass who would speak really slowly and then be all "do you understand? Do I need to explain it more simply?" It was so charming. Then, while I was downloading it, he hung up on me.

And that is when my rage hit an all time high for the day.

So I called back but a girl answered and she was really helpful and knew what to do (unlike the previous two people) and kept apologizing for how wrong they were and how they didn't actually fix anything. Apparently everything they told me was BS aside from needing to download the desktop version.

Everything was finally fixed and she reimbursed me for the online charges since I had so many issues and I only had to pay like 19.95 for e-filing. Not too shabby. I would have preferred having those three hours of my life back, but I suppose that's not an option.

And after all of that, I am getting the smallest refund I have ever gotten in my life.








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