Phone call

Monday 6/3/24

Tax collector kindly called me this morning before eight on account of me being sufficiently freaked out that I had left her a message at six AM on Saturday. She said, "I figured if this guy was up then leaving me a message, I can call him now." Correct. My latest paperwork has been received but not assigned to anyone as of yet. She told me that this could take months still to rectify and likely would. Again, this is all because of The Wall Street Journal and their incompetence.

This has been like a part time job for me for a long time now. So in addition to all of that time sucked out of my life, which I'll never get back, and all of the energy I've had to expend, there is the massive amount of stress and the toll that has taken on me. Huge, huge amounts of stress. Because this is terrifying, right? Regularly hearing from the government at the federal and state levels about huge amounts of money they think you owe them? (A few days ago, I saw the mailman at one end of my street, and rather than continue on to where I was going, I stopped, stood on the street corner, watched him go in one building after another until he got to mine, and when he left my building, I went in to see if there was anything from the government there.)

I should have restitution coming for me from The Wall Street Journal. Because this has been my multi-year problem to solve. My Kafkan world to navigate. I've been caught within the wheels of enormous bureaucratic systems because of The Wall Street Journal's incompetence, and even still this is not close to the worst thing The Wall Street Journal has done to me during this time period, and this is pretty bad by any measure, isn't it?

I very much appreciated the phone call today. She said that if tax collectors were permitted to update records themselves, many matters would be rectified simply and quickly, but that's not the system in place.