telephone befriends car in taxing childcare dilemma
“What are you talking about, Dan?” Nazy asks. “It was nothing special..”
“The middle of the week was April 15, my dear. Tax day.”
“Ooo..” Nazy began articulately. Then she interrupted herself. “But I didn’t sign any tax forms.”
“That’s because I asked for an ‘automatic’ extension.”
“Why didn’t you just…”
“I enclosed a check for estimated payments.”
“Why didn’t you simply send the complete tax return? And pay the taxes?”
“Our complete tax return is very complicated. We have a pension from Switzerland, a rental house in Washington, consulting income and currency fluctuations. Finding all the relevant material isn’t easy. Thinking about the taxes drains me.”
“But shouldn’t we just pay now?”
“Just pay!?” I thought as I looked at Nazy. Incredulous! Speechless. “Paying the taxes drains our bank account.” I explained.
“At some point, Dan,” Nazy continued. “You will have to pay.”
“Maybe I’ll die first.” I thought. Optimistically.. I thought about my earliest skirmish with the IRS.
Flashback, Memphis
“Just pay them,” my friend had said. “You’ll never win with the IRS. Pay what they want and forget about it. You do not want to go to an in-person visit.”
Well aware of the unassailable validity of my deduction, I ignored this advice. As a result:
Nazy and I were sitting in the bland beauty of the IRS auditor’s office. The surroundings exuded the ambiance of the entrance foyer of a medium security prison. “My” auditor, who had been personally hired by Alexander Hamilton in the late 1700’s, would have been at home in an exhibition of fossils from the Jurassic Era. In spite of this, her voice was firm and clear.
“NOT ALLOWED!” She declared after examining a deduction on my 1040 form.“Are you sure?” I asked reasonably.
She turned to a giant bookcase, pulled out a hardbound volume the size of the Book of Kells. “See!” she trumpeted triumphantly. “It says right here that you can’t take that deduction.”
“How stupid do you think I am?” I responded - squinting at the 6 point font.
She looked at me with the steely glare of civil servant who knew she didn’t have to be civil and she certainly wasn’t the servant.
“Why should I believe that there is nothing in one of the other 5000 books behind you that says I can take the deduction?” I asked, mistakenly thinking that we were talking about my money.
She sputtered. But I paid.
Later, my friend asked how things had gone with the auditor.
“Shut up!” I explained.
End Flashback
Last weekend, both Melika and Tom were out of town. Nazy and I agreed to watch Tiger, the Grand(est)son. Because we had a dinner engagement, we also arranged to have a baby sitter on hand for the first evening - a Friday. We left dinner early because..
“We promised the babysitter that we’d be home before 10:00.” Nazy said.
“Wow!” I thought. “I haven’t had to worry about a babysitter for 40 years.”
Since the baby had just learned to sleep in the crib, Nazy and I decided to spend the nights at Melika and Tom’s house - where the crib was. When we got there, the sitter said that the baby had just woken up from a (gaps!) long nap.
“Uh oh,” I thought. “He shouldn’t be taking a long nap just before it’s time for him to sleep for the night. The whole night.”
“How long did he sleep?” Nazy asked.
“About 3 hours,” Yari replied.
“He slept the entire time that we were gone?” I asked. “That’s definitely not good,” I thought. Presciently. (A normal nap is 45 minutes.)
I responded to this potential catastrophe with the skill of a talented grandparent. I took the lad aside and explained why he should be sleepy. I described the importance of an extended overnight snooze. I reminded him that his grandparents like to sleep, uninterrupted, at night. He listened but clearly didn’t internalized the message. In fact, he spent the next several hours cheerfully playing. And, since he is highly mobile, intensely curious and unabashedly social (i.e. uninterested in amusing himself), he spent that cheerful time with us - and with Monster, the cat. When he finally went to sleep, we (naively)expected him to sleep soundly for the entire night.
Expectations were, of course, dashed. He ‘slept’ neither soundlessly nor the entire night - a situation that was replicated the following (baby-sitterless) day. (Although he did wake up with ‘bad hair’.) He shunned naps. He was cute and playful. He was not quiet and restful. When Melika finally got home, Nazy and I drove directly to our house. We skipped the news and Nazy even skipped her Camomile tea. We went directly to bed. Nazy fell asleep immediately. I was quicker: sleeping on the stairs that le]d to the bedroom.
The next morning - very late the next morning, we discussed the situation..
“If prospective parents knew what would happen when a baby was born, humanity would become extinct.”
“But he is so cute, Dan.” Nazy replied, skewering my assertion.
He is very cute. For example, he’s at the pointing stage. He points at things he wants. He especially likes my ice-tea, soft-boiled eggs, Greek yoghurt, an assortment of books (Fingers and Toes, Farm Animals, Dr. Suess’ Mr. Brown can Moo), a toy car, a ball …
Suddenly, I had an idea! “That’s it!” I thought. “I just have to point to his crib and ..”
Regular readers are aware of the problems that I had with the yellow Nokia Lumina a Windows smart phone that has a spectacular camera. I loved the phone except for a few foibles. In spite of several trips to the Apple store (and extensive research on the web), I was unable to successfully disengage Apple’s iMessage ‘feature’. As a result, text messages sent to my phone number showed up on my iPad and my MacBook Pro - but not on my phone. And, when the battery’s charge declined (something that occurred all too frequently), the Lumina’s power saving system protected me by turning off WiFi, Bluetooth and the Ringer. I.e. it turned the telephone into a camera. But, power management did not restart these services when the battery was charged. The missing ringer caused me to miss several calls from my wife. Naturally, she was understanding.
“You never answer your phone, Dan. Either that phone is defective or you are a jerk.Which is it?”
In the interest of domestic tranquility (and before she realized that I was the jerk who bought the phone) I caved. I got an iPhone 6. I thought everyone would be happy. But the car’s computer, we’ve named her Dagmar, was not amused.
“That feature is temporarily unavailable,” Dagmar responded when I asked to send a text message.
It turns out that my Nokia phone, which had been shipped from Germany had been bundled with an application that provided voice to text messaging for German cars. Dagmar would read my text messages and I could simply dictate replies. This feature didn’t work with the new phone. While I was thinking about what to do, Dagmar spoke up..
“The mobile telephone app is missing.”
I called the dealership.
“… that App is not available on the iPhone,” the service manager explained.
“Now who’s the jerk?” Dagmar asked.
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Dan and Tiger 