The Good:
I have been to the office, it's 8AM and I'm home again. The day yawns before me with time to edit more photos, scrap, and design.
Last Friday was two weeks since Joe made his "confession" that he'd been acting like a cab driver instead of like a King's Kid on a mission to cab drivers and passengers. That was quite a victory, one I'd given up on ever seeing, strictly an answer to prayer. Out of curiosity, I had him look at his earnings for the two weeks prior to Confession Friday and for the two weeks since Confession Friday. They were up $260. This in spite of the fact that Vegas has had no big conventions and the town has been more or less empty. It's amazing what God can do when you give Him something to work with. This is still, by no means, a cure to our financial ills, but it IS a start. Thankfully, God is a God of increase. I firmly believe God will turn the Heavens upside down if necessary to get our increase to us.
The Bad
Poor Joe. He was on his way home from work on Monday when he heard a thunk. At that point, the Air Conditioner on our 15-year-old Mitsubishi stopped blowing cold air and started blowing hot, outside air instead. We are praying the weather will break, but, for today, the record high is 103, that record having been set in 1978. Wanna guess the forecasted high for today in 2010? Yup, 103. I may need to give him mouth-to-mouth when he gets home, if I can stand the smell of one VERY SWEATY, cranky, miserable man! This has certainly been our summer for Air Conditioning woes.
The Downright Ugly
Remember that $18,000 IRS penalty I was working on last week. Well to refresh, in July we received a letter threatening us with $18,000 in penalties for not filing 2007's W-2s with the proper authorities. I did not start with the company until July, 2008, so I knew nothing about these W-2s which would have been due to employees on 1/31/08 and due to the government on 2/28/08. I forwarded the letter to the company's CPA who handled such matters before I came to work there. A good 6 weeks later, while I was in his offices, meeting with his associate about the 2009 corporate return, he stopped by to say that his firm had only prepared one quarterly return for our company that year and had not done the W-2s and therefore he could offer no help. I was assigned a bunch of what I considered "make work" by the associate and determined that I would have to work on the 2007 w-2 problem as soon as I got that completed. I finished everything up and noticed that my inbox was piled high with miscellaneous "stuff". As I began opening mail, filing paid bills, etc., I found a letter from the IRS. The letter was dated September 6 and gave us 10 days from the date of the letter to contact the IRS about the W-2s. I found the letter on 9/22/2010. I ran reports from our system and the numbers I got there did not tie to the IRS's number. I remembered that the CPA had mentioned that our system had crashed about that time. I decided to try to get my hands on some 2007 W-2s and print what I could from our system and see if that would help. That morning I decided to bring the IRS's letter home with me. In re-reading it, I found a sentence that we could send them specific information if we wanted IRS to remove or reduce the penalty as long as we did so by 9/27/10. And, I had a "God Breeze", remembering that some time ago someone had mentioned that a certain box had 2007 "stuff" in it. I dug in the box, found a lot of dust, 4 Forms 941 prepared by the CPA's office, W-2s prepared by the CPA's office, a Form 940 prepared by the CPA's office, and like that.......It was Thursday, 9/23/10. I immediately called the IRS and waited on hold for almost an hour. When I finally got a human on the phone, she wouldn't give me any information. Although I have a Power of Attorney for the company on file in the local office, apparently they have never posted it to the national computer system so the person I was talking to had no way to confirm that I was eligible to receive information about the company. I did manage to secure a street address, after another long hold, for the office that had sent us the notice. I drafted a letter for the owner's signature, explaining the situation. I called one of the two people in charge twice. It was hours later I got a return phone call, explaining that his phone had died and that was why he had not returned my calls. In the meantime, I prepared an e-mail for both the owner and manager, explaining that I had attached a letter which they could revise in any manner they felt appropriate. However, to the best of my knowledge it was factual and explained how we had gotten into this pickle. I also stated that I would drop off the W-2s at the office early in the morning. I told them they would need to 1) review the letter and revise it as they deemed necessary; 2) photocopy the W-2s and attach them to the letter; 3) sign the letter: and 4) FEDEX the letter to the street address in KY that I had obtained from the IRS. I reiterated 3 times in ALL CAPS that this had to be done TOMORROW, TOMORROW being 9/24 and the last day to get an overnight package to Kentucky by 9/27/2010.
Yesterday, September 28th, I got an e-mail from one of these people asking me why this pile of W-2s was lying on the desk........and what was to be done with them........ This person admitted he had only read the first half of the e-mail I had titled "URGENT", and said he had been sick all weekend and forgot all about it. Then this person proceeded to fault me for not printing the letter, signing the appropriate name to the letter, copying the W-2s and paying for the gasoline and shipping costs up front out of my own pocket to send the thing out on a day I had told him I would be unable to work but would be available by cell phone if needed. So, for me, yesterday was another of those "no good turn goes unpunished" kind of days. I had worked my butt off to assure that the two responsible members of management had everything they needed to deal with the situation. I did everything but forge the owner's name and lick the envelope. I did everything necessary to save the company $18,000 in IRS penalties and most likely $1200 in CPA fees. In most companies, that would merit a bonus. The person accusing me of not doing what I should have done received two calls from me which were not returned for hours, read half of an e-mail titled "IRS" and "URGENT", ignored/missed the 3 x TOMORROW instructions, "Forgot" about it, had a very upset stomach so did not go into the office, and I am at fault. Have I told you lately that I love my job?
Joe and I were talking about this this morning by phone. We agreed that even if we were in the hospital we would have either checked ourselves out and gone to the office to handle this or paid someone to bring us the materials so we could handle it from our hospital beds. How many times have I had to go there, chock full of pain pills and muscle relaxers, just because a payroll was due, so no one would get their paycheck a day late? This person couldn't get past an upset stomach to save $18,000. Further, it seems that every time I have gone the extra mile at this company, I have caught HELL for it. Yes, I dare use that word because I have concluded this entire thing is satanic in nature. We can't forget when I got screamed at and was threatened with being fired because I spent 20 minutes cleaning the office. Remember when I got in trouble for cleaning the bathroom? Let me show you something:
How would you like to go sit down to do what is necessary in a bathroom that looks like that? These photos were taken in November, 2009. It has been cleaned once since then and currently looks worse than this..........
In my experience, when satan launches a full-on frontal assault, a blessing from the Lord is not far behind. My job now is to forgive and do the job I am paid to do without being mean or nasty to anyone or about anything. I will need your prayers. Yesterday I was deeply hurt, almost dazed. This morning my blood pressure was 150 over 92. But, I've spent some time with the Lord and I'm feeling better now.
Design
Mostly I spent yesterday editing photos from our trip. I'm about half done. Though the fall color was not what I'd hoped for, I still got some excellent photos.
However, on Monday I put a beautiful new kit in my store at ACOT. I had trouble with the server at NDISB but am going to try again today to upload there. I wanted to show you some previews and some layouts my team and I did with the kit which is called True Colors.
SOME of the elements (too many to show nicely in a preview):
The patterned papers:
Of course, there are solid colored papers to coordinate with the patterned papers. I usually don't show those, but these have a unique texture on them so here's a look:
Don't you just want to reach out and run your hand over those "bumps"?
Here are the pages some of my CT ladies and I did with the kit:
One from Barb:
Two from Karen:
and one from me (using a new fall color photo from Kolob Reservoir):
So, if you like the kit, you can find it in the HotFlashDesigns digital shop at ACOT. Grab it now while it's on introductory special.........It won't be fall forever, you know.
I've got to go retry that upload to NDISB and do some other advertising type things and then scrap a page for Bella Gypsy. Have a blessed day.
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