September 12, 2007

Typical keystone cops bullshit from the city I am happy to be away from,...only this is the kind of keystone cops thing that matters since it involves my money.

I have a house and also a small separate parcel next to it, which means I have always paid two different taxes. The main tax bill for the house and most of the land get billed automatically. The little bill I just pay myself each year directly, no problem.

Being obsessive to a degree, I took care of every damn bill and potential bill I could think of before leaving for a year. This includes especially my taxes, since I hate getting a tax bill surprise and especially to give the shitbag city, state, or federal governments any more pennies than I am required (unlike you, who I am sure loves to pay taxes, you toady). I went to the city and spoke to a for-real person and made sure that everything as ducky. I was good to go.

Then the city, in its wisdom, and without asking, consulting, or even informing me, combined the parcels, eliminated the automatic bill feature, and, this is the best part, completely erased any evidence that I have ever owned a separate piece of property, or that I ever have paid taxes on it, that it has ever been billed, and so on. And the city tax person on the phone, who would only give me her first name like she works for the phone company rather than being a public employee, spoke very sarcastically to me with things like "well, sir, if I had a parcel and it suddenly disappeared I would wonder just where it could have gone and might want to take steps to find it." Madness. Though she was intrigued with the idea, a stunningly original idea on my part, that perhaps the city should send a form letter out when it combines parcels and erases the old records, so the property owner has a faint clue that they have a new account that is not in the system anymore. Isn't this why I pay property taxes, so the city can send out form letters? It isn't, from what I have observed, for the city to stop people from shooting off guns all the time (sometimes into other people).

After an hour of calls to different departments (since they use different computer systems! In a dinky little city!) It is seemingly all now taken care of, but since these things always take at least two full rounds of ass wiping, I am ready for yet more.

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