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Things done today:

1. Caught up on replying to rental inquiries and incomplete applications.

2. Restarted my computer before it could force-restart at the worst possible moment. (It's been nudging me for two days, but I needed to get some files into a place where a restart wouldn't scramble everything.)

3. Worked with Mom Boss and Lawyer Man to provide evidence of what had gone wrong with our website contact forms, which apparently had been broken for over a month. This has now been fixed.

4. Scheduled a bunch of apartment tours.

5. Floor plans.

6. And then, at my tax job, I discovered I had four new drop-off returns. I got one completed and started a second before my scheduled client of the night arrived. And there my troubles began, because somehow the client and their spouse had BOTH earned significantly more money than last year (yay!), but their employers had BOTH withheld less income tax (boo hiss). So they had an unexpected massive bill due, which is never good news. Hopefully this year they will actually take my advice and adjust their W4 forms. :/

...

In unrelated news, I read Lyorn yesterday (Steven Brust's latest entry in the Vlad Taltos series), and am now about 1/4 of the way through a reread because I need to think about it some more.

Very good book! Resolves some things, sets up a bunch more, tugs on various threads that have been laid at various points in multiple earlier books, etc. But yeah, definitely something that merits a closer read.

Also, can someone who has finished the book and has ANY SKILL WHATSOEVER at extrapolating sources from parodic lyrics PLEASE tell me the original songs the chapter-opening numbers are riffing off of? I count myself very lucky that I recognized THREE, and I feel my enjoyment of the book would be greatly enhanced by knowing what fucking tunes are supposed to be running through my head.
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Assorted work tasks from the past two days:

1. Yesterday I finished the updated floor plans for the 5th floor of Building 1 AND finished the updated floor plans for Building 2. I am not sure if I my next floor plan task should be cleaning up the last straggler apartment plans for Building 1 or working on floor key plans for Building 3.

...When I put it that way, I think I will finish Building 1 before I begin tackling Building 3, because I will undoubtedly have to do some individual apartment tweaking in Building 3 as I go along. (The previous employee who built our existing apartment floor plans for Building 3 used the 3rd floor as a template, which is fine for that floor and the 2nd floor, but produces significant discrepancies for the 1st and 4th floors. I have fixed some of those issues, but I'm dead sure more remain to bite me.)

2. Returned to my key inventory project. Today I spent only a little time actually inventorying keys, because I spent about an hour rationalizing the key storage system for Building 4. Whoever set up the storage system for that building decided (gods only know why) that all keys for each apartment should hang from a single label tab, by means of a central key ring with a bunch of subsidiary rings attached to it. This put A LOT OF WEIGHT on an individual break point, and also created a thicket of tangled metal that was nearly impossible to catalogue or count.

Also also none of our other keys were set up like that, so from the bottom of my heart, I would like to ask my predecessors what the actual fuck they were thinking.

Anyway, I dug up some old plastic label tabs and spent some time separating keys into "apartment A," "mailbox A," "apartment A bedroom 1," "apartment A bedroom 2," and so on. Then each apartment got its main key hung on a single hook (with the mailbox keys on a subsidiary ring because they are small and light), and the bedroom keys hung by their individual label tabs on the next hook over.

I had to move a few other things around, but that entire rack of keys is now much more legible and also FAR less likely to have a plastic label tap crack from excessive weight and spill keys all over the floor.

3. This morning Ms. Rise-and-Shine called me (she was working from home on account of ongoing medical issues) to ask me to type a printout into MS Word so Company Owner could edit it. I looked at the document, and it was the same exact file that Company Owner kept me late last Thursday to convert from a PDF to a Word doc. Apparently he forgot I'd done that and also somehow managed to lose the file in his bizarrely organized computer.

I dug up my email with the converted file and forwarded it to Ms. Rise-and-Shine so she could double-check that no formatting had been lost in the conversion. She then forwarded the Word doc back to Company Owner and asked me to tell him to check his email when he came into the office around 3pm, which I did.

Company Owner desperately needs a full-time personal assistant to keep him on track, but fat chance of that ever happening. *sigh*

4. Tonight I moved four tax returns from "missing documents" to "as soon as you give me your direct deposit information I can upload this," but alas, I wasn't able to actually finish anything. Hopefully tomorrow all the clients in question will have replied to my messages!
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Company Owner is back in Ithaca for a bit, and yesterday he asked me to do some market research on two new apartment complexes on/near the Commons. So I made him some printouts because he is not great with technology. Today he called me into his office to explain that I should always put my name on reports like that (to take credit for my work), and also that I should include the date I did the research and the date I printed the report.

And I was thinking to myself, "Oh yeah, good point about the name, but surely he realizes the other information is in the file metadata?" until I remembered that he's not good with computers so obviously he will never see any metadata, and this is not a case where redundancy will cause any problems. I will be more redundant in any future reports I write for him.

On a tangentially related note: I also had to stay over 20 minutes late at work last night to convert a PDF into a Word document, because Company Owner doesn't know how to do that. First I tried to do the conversion on his own computer, but I don't know what on this good green earth he has done to his setup. I'm not even sure he actually had the file open in Adobe rather than some strange browser extension? Then I tried to find his email program so I could email the file to myself, but fuck if I could work out where he'd stashed that either.

So I asked him to open his email and send me the file. He did so, whereupon the email spent over two minutes in transit because of the inscrutable whims of the internet.

And then, when I received the email, downloaded the file, and tried to open it, Adobe announced that it had just finished updating and I would need to restart my computer before I could do anything relating to PDFs. *headdesk*

Anyway, once I was FINALLY able to open the file, I converted it and emailed the Word version back to Company Owner in about a minute. Because that's not a hard process unless the universe is conspiring against you!

-----

Tonight I completed two tax returns for in-person clients, and got through about 85% of a digital drop-off return. I messaged the drop-off clients to let them know what information was missing, and hopefully they'll send that in tomorrow.

-----

And in completely unrelated news, I gave blood on Tuesday evening. I wanted to do that back in mid-February, but first I was ill, then I couldn't find a drive that worked with my schedule, and then I was ill again. Tax season is always frustrating that way. But I persevered!

I enjoy donating blood. It is a small, relatively simple way to make a positive difference in the world, and I have good veins and don't mind needles. The world is very big and full of problems, but at least I have this tangible action I can point to and say, "See? I am helping."
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We are getting toward the end of tax season, so appointments are coming faster. No more spare hours to faff around.

(I need to text Susan about finishing up her return next weekend.)

In completely unrelated news, I recently discovered that my local Wegmans makes a teriyaki salmon dish with udon noodles and some mixed veggies, which just needs to be popped in the microwave for ~2 minutes to reheat. I have consequently been on SUCH a salmon kick this past week. I could eat salmon forever -- I dunno why, it's just a flavor that never seems to get old for me.

Some other recent activities:

1. I have been on a kick of re-listening to Rusty Quill Gaming. I am currently up to the climax in Prague. (I am saving The Magnus Protocol for after tax season, when I will once again have some free time for stuff like cross-stitch and paint-by-numbers projects that I can do while wearing headphones -- I prefer not to listen in the car because they put a lot of effort into the audio editing and I like to catch it all clearly.)

2. I read through the seven extant books in Layla Lawlor's Keeley & Associates urban fantasy detective series, which are great fun. I then returned to nonfiction for a bit -- having finished a book on Roman Britain, I raced through The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs and am now reading about the Byzantine Empire. :)

3. I am also indulging in some childhood nostalgia as well as the feeling of "oh gosh I didn't know there were MORE books in that series!" by rereading Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy series. Unbeknownst to me, there are four books that follow Betsy through high school, and two more about Betsy as a young adult. I am looking forward to those!
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Professional tax prep is kind of like... look, income has to be reported. But sometimes clients get kind of weird about forms?

Expandcut for technical details )

-----

In other frustrating tax prep news, the client whose return is on hold because they were missing two income documents (and I wouldn't file their return without reporting that income) hung up on me when I called them last week to ask if they'd found the forms. This week they sent me straight to voicemail, but hopefully they listen to the message instead of auto-deleting it because the gist was, "Hey look, if you aren't going to bring me those two forms, can you please come to the office, pick up your other papers, and confirm that you're not going to file with us? That way I get your unfinished return out of my workload and you get off my call list. Win-win!"

I emailed another client to say, "Hey, we do need to finish your return, please schedule an appointment!" because their phone number just rang forever and then said it couldn't connect. I left voicemail for a third client to say, "Have you worked out with your child which of you is going to claim your grandchild so we can either edit or paper file your return?" And I emailed a fourth client to be like, "Hey, I uploaded your return a couple days ago, but you need to actually approve and sign it in order for us to send it to the IRS! Please let me know if you're having trouble."

We shall see if anything comes of those efforts.

-----

Today's client was lovely, though. They are a disabled veteran who likes to have someone look through their documents and see if they need to file. This is the third year I have reviewed their situation, and once again they were not required to file a federal or state return. We could have filed to get their small amount of withholding refunded by the state of New York, but that would cost more in prep fees than they'd get back. So they decided not to file, and I told them to let the payroll people at their extremely part-time job know to stop withholding state taxes they way they'd already stopped withholding federal taxes.

I always enjoy chatting with that client. Absolutely lovely human being. :)
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Due to a scheduling glitch at Not the IRS, I left the rental company office at 4:30pm today.

Okay so. This is deeply stupid on both the human error level and the "why does your program even do that??" level. This is also deeply tedious, but I want to put this on record so I can refer back to it if anything similar happens next year.

Expandcut for length and tediousness )

Anyway, my office manager was able to prod the area supervisor into fixing my availability and I moved the person who had scheduled a 4pm appointment to 6pm, but I figured it would be less trouble to just keep the 5pm appointment than to make the people in question move to a different day.
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We had an office meeting today at the rental company -- we try to do that at least one Friday each month, but we'd let it slide for a while. As a result of assorted discussion topics, I generated one new checklist and one new supplemental lease page so we have the cleaning policy for shared apartments in writing -- that is not super important in the grand scheme of things, but should hopefully head off some arguments with future tenants.

I also finally schlepped some staging materials down to the Commons, which I had spent two weeks not getting around to. (First I was sick, then the weather was bad, and by the time those objections were gone the suitcase had faded in my mental background until Ms. Random Numbers reminded me it was still there.) And, of course, I am continuing my floor plan project.

At Not the IRS, my scheduled client was a no-show, and while my digital drop-off client did send me a new document, it was not either of the two documents I specifically asked her to give me. So I did some document scanning for my coworkers, answered a couple phone calls, and otherwise read and poked at the Friday NY Times crossword. (I have largely given up on the NY Times for any news that even vaguely touches on US politics, but I still like their games section.)

I have two calls scheduled with Susan -- one on Saturday to catch up, and one on Sunday to talk about her taxes -- and a call with Nick on Sunday night. I also plan to attend a chamber music concert on Sunday afternoon, so my weekend looks pretty full.
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Slow-ish day at the rental office today, by which I mean some stuff happened but my brain was sludgy so I spent most of my time futzing around with floor plans and writing an occasional email.

(Dear prospective tenants, when I say that a lease start date is based on the end date of the current tenants' lease, that means the date is fixed. I cannot kick the current tenants out two weeks early just so you can move in on a date more convenient for you. Why the heck would you even suggest that? Do you want us to do something similar to you in turn?!)

I was not originally scheduled to work at Not the IRS tonight, but on Monday my office manager texted to say somebody had requested an appointment with me on Thursday so she'd scheduled that and added me to the lineup. I said that was fine. Then when I checked my appointments this afternoon, that person had vanished into the ether... but I was still on the schedule.

So I went in expecting to be bored, but I wound up catching a walk-in client AND I had a digital drop-off to work on, so overall it was a good thing I was there.

After work I washed my load of linens, so I am now all caught up on cleaning laundry. (Putting laundry away? Eh, still in progress.) I also boiled some eggs and am working to schedule some phone calls with friends.

And now to bed, because sludge-brain is nobody's friend and sleep is the best method of warding it off. :)
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I begged off my (tiny, no appointments) shift at Not the IRS Friday evening, because I slept TERRIBLY on Thursday night, managing a total of only four hours despite lying in bed for a bit over nine hours. I kept almost drifting off and then jolting myself back awake with a coughing fit.

I did sleep much better Friday night (switched from soothing my throat with honey to gargling saltwater, which is both apparently more effective and less brutal on tooth enamel), but I am still pretty tired and plan to hit the sack early once more.

The cold is definitely thinning, but I still sound like a crow rasping through an old boot, I have a constant low-grade headache, and my respiratory system continues to produce upsetting quantities of goo. :(

Anyway, I had some interesting tax clients today, including Expandobscured for an additional layer of anonymizing ) Which is a nice consolation prize for missing the concert, I guess?!

Tomorrow I think I will have the spoons to attempt some laundry. Am I going to wash everything that's built up while I have been languishing? Oh HELL no. But I think I can sort through and wash... hmm. Probably a load of all my underthings and socks, a load of some skirts and shirts, and a load of linens. That will leave at least two more loads' worth of dirty fabric, but that is a problem for future!Liz.
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I wound up taking sick days Monday and Tuesday and sleeping about 14 hours per day. It has sort of helped?

Last night I forgot to reset my alarm from 9am to 8am, so I worked a slightly-too-short shift at the rental company. Ah well, I am sure I needed the sleep. (Still sick, for the record. Less drastically so than before, but my voice is absolutely shot and I am still gooey and coughing, blargh.)

Then I had two tax clients at Not the IRS, both of whom had moderately complicated returns, so I didn't get out of there until nearly 8:30pm.

I am basically internet surfing to wind my brain down, and then I will go fall straight into bed because tomorrow I get to do it all again, WITH the addition of running back and forth between the downtown and Collegetown rental offices because Mom Boss is out of town and Aunt Boss has a lunch engagement so they want me to play backup for Newest Hire until Aunt Boss gets back. *sigh*

Ah well, at least the two tax returns were interesting?

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Elizabeth Culmer

July 2025

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