Wednesday, February 20, 2002
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Wednesday, February 20, 2002 |
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Let the Hobgoblins out By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
This annual season of self-examination and reflection and I mean tax time, not Lent is hard enough to negotiate without the irregularity of standardization in forms and receipts. Dave does our taxes himself, with a little help from software designed to make it easy (yeah, right), and all he asks of me is to document my earnings and the business expenses I claim. The earning part is easy, thanks to the timely arrival of a 1099 from the newspaper, as well as stubs of paychecks, big, clear and easy to sort. The business expenses are not so easy. My search requires rummaging through a basket of sometimes wrinkled and fading receipts to match them up with my computer's allegations, to separate business expenses from household. I'd like to ask the register-and-credit-card-receipts deities one simple question: Why can't these important scraps of paper be designed with some consistency in the arrangement of critical clues such as the date? Take this handful of locally generated receipts. These from the post office are printed bright and clear at the top-left edge. That seems to me the logical place, since I date letters there. Kroger's is black-on-white, easy to see and fairly easy to find, right after the information that my cashier was Misty. Staples puts the date near the top, but hides it among other numbers: 1035 06/13/01 12:47. Cost Plus writes it out June 18, 2001 but on the very last line of the tape. Thought I never would find the date on Pike Nursery's very faintly printed receipt. Fourth line from the bottom, and camouflaged: Register: REG5 Jun 20 2001 2:39 PM. Sears's is near the center of the slip. Wal-Mart's is clear, but at the bottom, beneath a line enjoining me to cash my tax rebate check here. Are they trying to be funny? And this one from Omega Books a third of the way down a slip printed all in caps, and with lots of colons and a diagonal slash through the numeral 0. To these fading eyes the receipt appears to be dated :86/13/81. Kmart may be the worst of all. I pulled several to compare them. They are printed very light on off-white paper, and the date is almost at the bottom. The strangest thing |
