Back from C-Bus

7: The number of hours until the weekend.

I have returned from my overnighter in Columbus, and really, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. We actually had a lot of downtime that we were able to spend catching up with the other VISTAs, and it's always nice to share stories with people who are in the same boat as you.

The taxes themselves...well let's just say I'm not a fan of doing taxes by hand. I may actually strive to maintain a job that will keep my household income less than $56,000 a year so I can just use The Benefit Bank forever.

It wasn't really difficult to do the taxes by hand, but it was frustrating. It didn't take long for the people at my table to create a mess of pencils, tax reference packets and calculators. Check out that clutter.

The only really frustrating part of it was not having a lot of room to work. And occasionally not understanding what a particular question was asking for. The tax manual that was given to us was about 100 pages, (see Kaitlyn holding it up with a look of amusing frustration) and we often struggled to find the answers we needed to fill out the 1040. The worst part was when we only had a few questions left and we'd get stuck on line 67b or whatever, and have to spend fifteen minutes figuring out a single question. Very frustrating. But the next day we were able to practice with the Benefit Bank software. We finished two scenarios in the time it took us to fill out one tax form by hand. Much better.

Kaitlyn is hard at work!

I am already nervous about my first tax training, even though I don't have one until October 30.

Wait...that's just next week.

...Crap.

P.S. Sorry about the spacing on this blog. I tried to figure out how to fix it, but all Blogger had to say about it was, "Yeah...kind of sucks, doesn't it?"