Fingers Crossed...

...that the worst of tax season is over. We got our butts royally kicked for nearly four weeks straight. At this point, we've got to be a hundred returns past where we were last year. Even now that things have slacked off a bit, I'm still cranking out ten returns every shift. By this time last year, I was spending most of the day reading books, doing blog posts, checking up on Facebook, etc. If this keeps up, we'll be sittin' pretty come season-end bonus time, but getting there has been fairly grueling so far.

Not that corporate is making our jobs any easier with their Advances, Walmart gift cards, and every other gimmick you can think of to extract money from the clients for anything other than doing their taxes. Without all the "banking products" (every one of which is pitched to us as a way to "enhance" revenues), we could easily shave 20% off our fees. Worse yet, the code monkeys at HQ completely screwed the pooch implementing the stupid gift card thing so about one out of every ten people never get one. But the $50 is still being subtracted from our revenue by corporate. And we usually end up writing a $50 check to shut the customer up, who will likely never darken our door again. When you call the help desk, all they tell you is to talk to the local rep. Who has not one iota more control over the thing than we do, which is absolutely none.

In other news, there ain't much other news. Debbie is still cranking away for her busy season, which just got a little busier because one of the few remaining agents is "no longer with the company." For the entire five-and-a-half years she's been working there, the number of agents has steadily dwindled from 13 or 14 to six, with no plans by management to get anyone new anytime soon. And by the time they do, given their past history, another agent or two will become "no longer with the company."

In spite of all that, we did manage to sneak away for an evening to go see Bob Seger at the Amalie Arena in Tampa. As usual, trying to get anywhere in Tampa while an event is going on was a bad joke, aided by the fact that the Tampa police were a complete no-show. The concert was on a Thursday evening, meaning we had the twin joys of dealing with daily commuter traffic, which by itself completely gridlocks the mess the city "planners" have made of downtown, combined with an extra 20,000 or so people trying to get to the Amalie.  But the concert was well worth all the grief of getting there, and, for a few hours at least, we were able to forget all about taxes and cruises and old-people park drama and the Carefree RV Resorts corporation and its ass-hat CEO, Nancy No-Nuts. It was a very pleasant few hours. The trip home was easier than the drive in (no thanks to the still-non-existent Tampa police) because by then, the commuter traffic was gone and everyone was more-or-less going the same way.

And then it was back to the same-ol' same-ol'.

Speaking of which, I see that ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh released a video of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians who were in Libya, which, thanks to the tender ministrations of the US military, is now a part of the Caliphate. As they were Egyptian, the Egyptian military responded with air strikes inside Libya with which is shares a long border. This is an entirely logical response. I'm sure the US will be equally logical and will strongly condemn the killings, offer condolences to the families of the victims, and let Egypt handle its own affairs.

Heh. Yea. Right.

I'm sure it's just a matter of time before, as the Joker said, "everyone loses their minds," and we stage another of our ISIS recruiting events. The Forever War must be perpetuated.

Meanwhile, our "leaders" have been so lost without the Cold War that they seem desperate to start a hot war with Russia. I can't for the life of me figure out what we hope to accomplish by getting into a shooting war with a major, nuclear-armed military power, over who gets to claim the complete basket case of a country that goes by the name "Ukraine". This won't be like any of our recent wars with such military non-entities as Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. Not that we've been exactly decisive in all of those, but they were a cake-walk compared to what going head-to-head with Russia will be. Unless the goal is to eliminate a sizable fraction of the US's 20-something population, I can't see what we hope to gain. (Other than the obvious benefit to the military-industrial complex, of course. But that goes without saying.) Why would NATO or Europe want a corrupt, bankrupt country without much in the way of oil or gas? It currently serves as a pipeline route for Russian natural gas being sent to Europe, but how is destroying that infrastructure while simultaneously pissing off the Russians going to benefit Europe? Are our heads of state beginning to believe their own bullshit? That the US can supply all of Europe's natural gas from our non-existent surplus (The US is still a net importer of natural gas) converted to LNG in non-existent facilities, and shipped aboard a fleet of non-existent LNG-capable ships?

Have we gone stark raving mad?

OK, that sort of answers itself.