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I am a working man.  Our skeleton crew (yes, I’ve already hired and put the bones to work) needs my help, so today I worked myself to exhaustion.  I wore the tines off of three rakes.  You could hear them snap from half a mile away, I swear.  I strapped on a backpack blower and experimented with the different angles and rpm’s necessary to lift me off the ground.  I pulled on a mower rope a thousand times, gave up, and bought a new mower.

Our part of the metropolis is clean again.  Evil is held at bay.

The word findings, I come to find out, is slang for “you owe us roughly one thousand dollars.” Erin the Auditor cleared that up for me as soon as I had taken a seat.

“We’ve disallowed the child support payments that were paid through the company and classified as an employee loan,” she says.  She is, of course, referring to the payments I’d made over the last eighteen years for my daughter, paid by the company only because the State of Oregon, in cooperation with the State of Arkansas, had decided that the support needed to be withheld from my paycheck in spite of the fact that there was no court order for any such thing.  And believe me, no amount of phone calls or letters or personal visits to people’s offices could convince anyone otherwise.  I was not about to try and convince Erin.

“So we’ve adjusted up your wages for the last three years, to reflect these amounts,” she says, pointing to the papers she’d handed me when I’d walked in, “and this amount here reflects the penalty and interest now due for those years.”

Erin looks different today, and then I realize that she doesn’t have her hair in a bun.  Pulled back in a ponytail, it almost looks playful.  And then it hits me - it’s the Friday right before Halloween.  By taking her hair out of its bun, Erin is dressed for the holiday.  Leave it to an accountant to imagine such an affordable costume.

One of the problems, she goes on to explain, is that I have not been paying myself enough.  Basically, it boils down to this.  Based on Erin’s study of other companies similar to my own throughout Marion County, and based on the number of hours I claim to work during a normal working week, I should be making quite a bit more money.

No shit, Erin.

And because it appears that I was not actually paying myself this “fair” amount, the child support figures would be factored into my wages in order to “bring the numbers closer to what they actually should be.”

What the fuck?  I’m being penalized because I don’t pay myself enough?  I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this one.  I thought struggling financially was payment enough?  I imagined what Erin would say if I was one of those monks who walked around the streets all day whipping himself in the back.  Would a study of other monks in the area show that I wasn’t being hard enough on myself?

“You can, of course, contest these findings by filing with the Employment Department,” Erin informs me.  Let me, if you will, interpret this for everyone so that there is no misunderstanding:

You may delay payment and incur more finance charges if you’d like, as well as continue to pay your accountant her salary.

I know when I’ve been beat.  Erin and I shake hands and she thanks me for my time.  It’s time to leave.

Now I know I keep talking about resting my head against her breast, and I must admit, I thought about it one more time.  What could it hurt?  Wouldn’t she just take it as some sign of submission, that I’d been broken, patted on the head, and placed back into the herd to continue breeding taxable income?  How could she take offense by such a harmless gesture.  I should do it, I thought.

But I didn’t.  I couldn’t risk causing any suspicions, not when I was that close to getting out the door and wrapping this whole audit up.  Besides, I was afraid if I got that close to her chin, I might be tempted to give her a little head butt, just to see if I could make her ponytail swing around a little.  That’d be fun, I thought.

By the time I’d walked down the flight of steps and back out to my car, I’d already decided on my next move.  Because that’s what it’s all about, you know.  The moves.  They move, then you move.  Then they move again, and so forth and so on.  It’s all a game, with the only problem being that they enjoy playing it a whole lot more then I do.  Must be the benefits.

Anyway, all I need to do is lay myself off next month and collect back my money.  Simple.  And that crazy Erin, she’s really going to be fuming when she realizes that by bumping up my wages for the last few years, all she really did was give me a fatter unemployment check.  I bet she’ll be hopping around her cubicle when she finds out about this one.  If I know her, I bet she would’ve rather taken the head butt then give away a single penny.

What did I tell you?  Cycles.  I toss and turn one night, and the next I sleep completely through, which for me is a rare event.  Maybe it’s because I sat at my desk for ten straight hours, pushing my way through pile after pile of receipts.  I think it was thought of hiring a secretary that scared me into action.  I mean, think of all the things that could go wrong.  Right off the top of my head I thought of ten things, and I’m sure there’s plenty more.

1. What if she ends up being a forgery expert, and keeps my checking account drained?
2. I don’t find out until it is too late that she enjoys changing her hair color, and each and every Monday she arrives at her desk with new hair.  This alone could be so disconcerting that I get nothing done.
3. She interviews nicely, hiding the fact that she smacks her gum and says things like, “yada yada yada” and “to make a long story short,” which everyone knows is just a quick way for someone to get onto an even longer, more boring story.
4. We become comfortable enough around each other that she begins asking me if she looks fat in certain outfits.
5. She has a jealous boyfriend who begins calling and checking up on her, finally telling me one day that I don’t want to fuck around with him.
6. She is actually quite good with the accounting software, and constantly heckles me about all the mistakes she finds.
7. She slowly begins to fill up my pleasantly empty house with knickknacks, thinking that she is doing me a favor.
8. She once worked for the state and constantly demands that I install cubicles in the office, even though there are only two of us.
9. She brings her own clock radio to work and plays Paul Harvey all day long.
10. She’s young, but wears a perfume that constantly reminds me of my dead grandmother.  I keep turning around, forgetting who is back there, and eventually pull a muscle that keeps my head painfully twisted to the side, tilted slightly down, which the secretary mistakenly takes as me staring at her chest.  She files a sexual discrimination suit.  I try to explain everything, but can’t lift my head to look the judge in the eye.  He takes this as a sure sign of guilt and rules in her favor, granting her a huge monetary award and the promise that I cannot possibly let her go.

What a night!  Awake from three to five, lying there with the blankets pulled up tight, yawning and yawning but never actually pulling the whole deal together.  And then sleep from five to seven, filled with one bad dream after another.  A divorce fight.  A big, four story house somewhere in the mountains, but apparently rented out as a dormitory to what seems like an entire college.  Some young guy calls me dude one too many times and I almost rip into the guy.  Another dream with some sort of police interrogation.  Someone escapes.  There’s shooting.  I’m trying to catch up with someone, but the snow is so deep.

There was more, but I think I’ve forgotten.

Wake up and shower the boy.  What’s with little boy B.O.?  Did I sweat and stink when I was eight?  I can’t imagine it.  I was skin stretched tight over a few puny bones.  Nothing more.  Bones don’t sweat.

Drop off the boy at school and a quick breakfast and coffee at the cafe.  Answer a few emails.  I love this place.  Good coffee, good food, and wireless internet.  But the table I slip into, the one nearest the only outlet in the place, proves to be a bad choice this morning.  A couple of young women on one side of me with a baby, and an old lady on the other side.  Everyone is quiet, no complaints there, but I keep smelling urine.  Is it the baby or the old lady?  I don’t really want to know, and yet, I love a good mystery.  Between slurps of coffee I discreetly lean one way, then the other, sniffing.  But my sniffing is as effective as my early morning yawing.  No results.  Maybe one of them will leave and solve the mystery for me.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe the dog peed on my shirt last night, it dried, and now I’m officially part of his territory, no matter how far I walk around the city. 

I need to push my way through those child support figures and come up with an agreeable alimony payment.  I have to factor in loan and gift money that will need to be repaid over time.  The house deal confuses everything.  The farm was bought from my parents with the help of money from her family.  I am over a barrel.  Everyone walks by and takes a slap at my ass, including the Employment Department.  Erin, the friendly audit woman, is getting restless.  How did she get my new cellphone number?  Did I give it to her?  I can’t imagine I’d get that lazy with my privacy.

“Hello Keith.  I’m just following up on those loan agreements that you promised to get to me.  Will I be seeing those soon?”

“I should be getting those to my accountant today,” I tell her.  That was Monday.  The days slip by so fast.  Surely she must have other files.  Someone else to pick on.  I should have never joked about resting my head against her breast.  She must have access to my email and website.  She’s resharpened her pencils and is coming after me.

But I wasn’t thinking about Erin as I tossed and yawned my way through the night.  Maybe I should have been.  Maybe that would have put me to sleep.  No, you know what I was thinking about?  I was thinking about hiring a secretary.  I was thinking about the huge, huge mess that my desk and accounting has become.  I was thinking about the daily payroll and billing that I am always behind on.  I was thinking about the luxury of someone else answering my phone.  I’ve wrestled with the mess all by myself for more then fifteen years, and the idea of turning it over to someone else becomes more and more attractive each day.  With each yawn this woman saviour became clearer and clearer in my imagination.  I almost had her completely visualized but then fell asleep.

But realistically, how in the world would I ever hire this person.  My office, which is honestly in a shambles, is now located in my apartment.  Who in their right mind would accept such a job?  And then there’s the move.  My guess now is that I’ll be back in the house before Christmas.  Do I hire someone for the next month or so, then give them a leave of absence while I relocate, only to call them back into yet another home office situation?  The whole thing is chaos.  I need to face the truth.  I have worked for fifteen years to create perfect chaos.  Let’s hope my insurance company doesn’t find out.  The worker’s comp rates for chaos are bound to be through the roof.