Naked at the Accountants

It's tax season. So like many Americans, today I sat across the desk from my accountant. It was the usual scene. After handing over W-2's, I sat with one hand on my husband's leg to reassure him, and the other scratching the accountant's dog's ass to keep him from whimpering, while my accountant and I reminisced about the funny tax-mail snafu of 2005, oh what a funny mix-up.

Art, my husband, has always filed his own taxes, so this was his first time to sit financially naked in front of someone else. Trying to resist the urge to protect his privates, he fidgeted in his seat like a boy in the principal's office, while looking at his virgin W-2’s exposed on the desk.

I don't think twice about having someone else do my taxes. First of all, I know I don't know what the hell I'm doing. Secondly, someone else doing it gets me more money back. And I've been financially naked for years. When my friends would ask me to go do something and I said, "I can't, I'm broke," they knew that I meant it. Broke – that was my financial status.

So after Art answered the questions, he relaxed. The dog even got tired and went and slept in his bed. Things were good, until the accountant made the mistake of candidly saying "So you're a Security Engineer, what do you know about..." then proceeded to ask Art a series of tech security questions, all resorting in the answer that the network is totally unsecured and could be hacked at any moment.

I should mention that Art spends his days hacking into networks and his pet peeve is how insecure business networks are. He's overly cautious when it comes to security. It took a half-day tutorial for me to learn how to get online at home.

So after giving this man all of our personal information, Art is a nervous wreck when he finds out the accountant doesn’t have a firewall. He's looking at me like, "What have you gotten me into?" And I’m calmly looking at him like, “Ah, live on the edge, have a little unprotected accounting every now and then. You only live once.”

Then the clincher is when we're all done and about to leave, the accountant says to Art, "Oh one last thing, just give me your checking account number and the refund will direct deposit." Art quickly looked back and forth between the accountant and his virus laden computer. He was so flustered that he gave the accountant and old phone number and his social security number before giving him the correct checking account number.