Boy, am I in trouble. And not the usual kind of “you left
the toilet seat up again,” or “you’re not watching the boys closely enough and they
started a fire on the sidewalk again” kind of trouble I’m normally in. This is
much worse. I’m in trouble with the IRS.
I know what you’re thinking. All those years of claiming the
neighborhood kids as dependents every time they ate a snack at our house finally
caught up to me. You might be right. Or maybe it was claiming the dog as a
business expense since I bounce book ideas off her? Who knows? All I know is it’s
serious.
I received an official phone call from a mechanical robot
voice the other day. It’s even worse than I thought. The IRS has obviously implemented
Terminator-type robot agents to do their wet work. “Taxinators,” if you will…
The Taxinator robot didn’t even wait for me to say hello. It
just got right to the point.
Hi, this is officer Magnus
calling from Washington, D.C. with the criminal division of the IRS.
Holy crap. The “criminal division.” More like the execution division.
I’ve seen the Terminator movies. Those silver robots are ruthless. They
literally have no ruth whatsoever.
Taxinator Magnus may have started cordially, but the
one-sided conversation quickly took a hard edge.
The matter as of hand
is extremely time-sensitive and urgent, as after audit we found that there was
a fraud and misconduct on your tax which you are hiding from the federal
government.
Hmm… Taxinator Magnus’s American English Grammar and Idioms
chip seems to be malfunctioning a bit. Maybe it got damaged in an IRS Criminal
Division shootout?
Be that as it may, I am deeply concerned that there is a
fraud and misconduct on my tax. But, I have to wonder… if I’m really hiding it
from the federal government, then how do they know about it? Probably some kind
of special next-level Taxinator computer processing tax fraud and misconduct algorithm.
Who can tell with these type of things?
This need to be
rectify immediately, so do return the call as soon as you receive the message.
Boy, again, it really seems like, given the existence of all
this futuristic Taxinator malfeasance-sniffing software, they would be able to
fix that grammar chip. Besides my internal need to rectify the tense of his verbs,
agent Magnus hung up before I could figure out exactly what he wanted me to do.
I realize “the matter as of hand” is extremely
time-sensitive and urgent, but am I supposed to return his call now, or wait
for an unmentioned second message? I mean, he said call back as soon as I
receive the message. Not this message.
On the one hand, I don’t want to make my fraud and
misconduct problems worse by accidentally ignoring the Taxinator’s instructions.
On the other hand, I don’t want to anger a six-foot-tall metal-alloy killing
and auditing machine by not following its instructions to the letter.
As a writer, I guess I am duty-bound to follow the grammatically
correct path. So, I’ll just fortify the front door, make an emergency escape
plan to fall back to the steel mill, and wait patiently for another official message
from Washington D.C.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2018 Marc Schmatjen
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