Thursday, March 8, 2012

Tumbleweed Tax Prep or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the IRS



Isn't paperwork fun?

Who doesn't love tax time?

And math, isn't math great??

I have finally completed the adding, subtracting and paperwork shuffling of 2011. Now I can spend my time usefully; staring off into space and looking up obscure information on the internet, instead doing the government's bidding.

Although, I do love the IRS, I mean those people are great, completely underrated and overworked. All that time they spend with those helpful flow charts and easy to understand directions. And they have the shiniest hair and are so fun to be around.

No need for an audit here, move along, Poindexter.

Here are some 2011 Tumbleweed facts from the adding and subtracting archives:


311 days on the road. Do you have any idea how many public bathrooms that is? Eleventy billion.
$60,000.00 worth of diesel, over 17,000 gallons. One barrel of crude oil makes about 10 gallons of diesel, the rest goes to gas, jet fuel, and crayons. That's 1700 barrels of crude oil. We should just move to Saudi Arabia now.
114,000 miles driven, almost half the distance from the Earth to the moon.
We only got paid for 107,000 of those miles. The other 7,000 miles are on us and accounts for bad directions and getting lost, personal use, and the fuzzy math that the trucking industry sets for paid mileage. 
$600.00 spent on showers and laundry, in public, cootie filled truck stops. (Insert sad violin music here)



All I have to do now is print this out and send it to the IRS. I know they will appreciate getting our tax information in a creative way, after weeks and weeks of looking at those boring tax forms with all those little lines and big words. We'll no doubt get a prize or something along with a big, fat refund.

We're probably going to need it when we get to Saudi Arabia.








 
 



10 comments:

  1. Damn those are some impressive stats! I'm kind of a fan of stats so I created some more for you:

    - You averaged over 350 miles a day
    - With that other 7,000 miles you could have driven from Alaska to Florida and still have a ton of miles to spare.
    - Having used eleventy billion bathrooms over 311 days translates to about 409 bathroom trips a second. You should probably see a doctor.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow Christian!

    I should have asked you to help with this post since it took you 3.7 seconds to translate the math into something understandable while it took me all morning to figure out that I had my shirt on backwards and I'm not being choked invisibly the the IRS.

    Yeah, I probably need a doctor.

    ReplyDelete
  3. You get to deduct the cost of your cootie shots, I hope.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Tumbleweed, you and Christian are hilarious bean counters, perhaps an application to the IRS is in orderfor both of you. (great article)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Taxes are just too complicated! That's why I don't bother to do them.

    On a side note, anybody asks, I was never here.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Just love that figure of eleventy billion and just bet that IRS would love it too. I'm very impressed with both yours and Christian's math abilities.
    Those figures equal an immense amount of time on the road and also show what hard workers yall are. I'm thoroughly impressed with yall's ability to keep on truckin. Not to mention how impressed I am with your resistance to cooties.

    ReplyDelete
  7. tax time. gag.
    the only time of the year i become a REAL procrastinator...

    after ALL the hours i spent going through a years worth of receipts. and what do we get back?? a big fat 94 bucks.
    i hope ALL your number crunching makes you smile more than mine did me.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Robyn, if only there were such a thing as a deductible cootie shot. Just another instance where the science people have failed us.

    Doug, thanks! I think Christian can count his beans faster than I can, but I would probably win at thumb-wrestling. (mainly because I cheat)

    Vinny? Vinny who? (C what I did there??)

    Cari, I don't know why eleventy billion is such a funny number, but the more I say it, the funnier I find it. (kind of like cornball. remember that?)

    Laura, I know right? Tax time just isn't all that fun. We have to pay estimated taxes throughout the year and I try to manage it where we'll break even. I don't mind not getting any back, but I dern sure don't want to owe!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Oh, I just love the IRS. We've been argueing (?) over $200 for a couple of years now. They say we owe it - we send them a check - they send us a new check back as a refund. This has recycled endlessly, EXCEPT they now say we owe interest on said $200 that we owe-but-get-back-as-a-refund. Who in the heck knows? Please let me know when you figure out how to deal with them! I think I have a headache, now...

    ReplyDelete
  10. Ladybug, that IS crazy! Did you compliment their shiny hair??

    ReplyDelete

Do what?