My gruelling three day work week is nearly over. Funny enough, it feels like it's been a full week because it has possibly been the most annoying week ever. First of all, my work computer has not worked properly since last Thursday, meaning that I haven't actually been able to perform roughly 85% of the very few tasks I need to complete each day. Despite numerous attempts at procuring assistance with this aged machine, all of my efforts have been (so far) ignored. I'm thinking that my requests are too Canadian (meaning that they include the words 'please' and 'thank you') and that I'm going to have to up the nasty quotient to get any kind of response. Normally, my "work" consumes mere minutes each day (not as nice as it sounds...you can only do so much F-booking and web surfing). Without even being able to do that, my week has felt long, boring and frustrating. I even resorted to fiddling around with my taxes, just to have something to do.

NO, my taxes are not filed yet, despite my early start. It's fairly difficult to do your taxes when the forms you need are stuck somewhere between the Great White North and the Rock, which is not known for timely mail delivery at the best of times. However, I have to say that this year's filing is an experience that I would have rather missed out on, even if that would have meant paying someone else to do them for me. Unfortunately, we do not have a troop of accounting students sitting in the local mall, waiting for us to fork over the $50 and hand off the task.

I considered myself to be a pretty intelligent person until I tried to tackle the Tax Guide on my own, armed with only a stack of forms and a calculator. I had visions of sitting there comfortably on my couch, working my way through the forms with a glass of wine, and still having time at the end of the night to squeeze in an episode of 30 Rock. What actually happened was that I managed to weed my way through most of it, found some fairly major hangups in the parts pertaining to our house (damn the house), spent approximately 2 hours pounding the keys of the calculator (because if you just press harder, the answer works out the way you want it to) and venting my frustration at Kurt, in the absence of Harley (who always took these things well). Seriously. Capital Cost Appreciation? Dividend what? It wasn't pretty. We worked away on our respective returns until after midnight, at which point I decided that I was over it. $#@% taxes. I lulled myself to sleep by coming up with reasons why we should just not file at all and stick it to the man. But then I woke up, intelligence resumed, and the messy stack is sitting here on my desk, waiting for me to have another go at it this afternoon. The good news is that the number at the very end of the return is lovely...so long as it's correct.

I need to make friends with a bored tax accountant, stat.

The whole process has made me feel like a moron and the thing is, I know I'm not. However, in my experience, the general population is riddled with actual idiots, and one has to wonder how they manage to get their taxes in order without the help of a professional. The Tax Guide should really come with a fill-in-the-blanks suicide note and a loaded gun so you can put yourself out of your misery.