1986 called, they want their document transfer technology back.
Oh, man you have no idea...
Recently I got my bank accounts drained because the California Franchise Tax Board mistakenly thought I owed them some back property taxes. (I didn't; my ex wife paid all the taxes on that property, but CA FTB's Demand Letters never reached either of us because of a forwarding-address clusterfuck, so CA FTB just went for the moneygrab when they didn't get a response from either of us for six months.)
In the process of straightening it all out, I went through this interesting process with the CA FTB:
- Call CA FTB.
- You can't wait on hold when you call them: They have to call you back (you punch your phone number into their automated system).
- By the way, each time I had to talk to the CA FTB dude (several times in the process outlined below), it was the same process: Call CA FTB, wait on hold, get the message that you can't wait on hold any longer, get offered the callback, punch in your phone number, wait a couple hours for the call back.)
- Finally get the call back from the Dude handling my case. First thing I ask is if Dude has a direct voice phone number reachable from the outside. He does not. Sigh. So I explain:
- Dude, I didn't live in CA for all those years, and that's my ex-wife's property which just happened to still have both our names on it. She paid the taxes. Gimme all my money back.
- Guy says, "Great, this should be an easy slam-dunk fix, then. I just need the tax returns: your federal tax returns proving that you didn't live in the state of CA, and your ex-wife's state and federal tax returns proving that these taxes have already been paid by her."
- Dude, they're my ex-wife's *California* taxes. You *have* them in *your* system. Here is her name, address, social security number, blood type, and favorite color. Look them up.
- Guys says "I can't look up someone else's taxes, I can only look up yours."
- *sputter*
- Okay dude, I guess I can get all the PDFs of all of my taxes and her taxes from those years. What's your email address so I can send you the PDFs?
- Dude says "I can't receive emails from outside. You have to fax them to me. Here is my fax number. This fax number goes directly to me."
- Dude, hang on. Okay, so I can't email them to you... I almost sorta maybe understand that. How about I just put the PDFs up on a web server so you can download them? Would that work?
- Dude says, "Nope, no external internet access."
- Okay, fine Dude, I'll send the first fax this afternoon. *sigh*.
- Find PDFs of my tax returns, and send an email requesting my ex-wife's tax returns from her.
- While waiting for her to send me her tax returns, I print out my tax returns (small), attempt to fax them to the dude via our company's physical fax machine. Process takes hours of me standing in the hall babysitting the fax machine because his fax number is too frequently busy or is dropping the call. Eventually get through one short 7-page physical fax. I get nothing else done that day because I had to stand there babysitting the machine. Actually it took trying on two different machines in two different hallways because I couldn't get the first one to work at all.
- Receive my ex-wife's taxes in PDF form. Hers are more complicated because she owns multiple properties. Her returns total something like 80 pages.
- Decide that there's no way I'm getting that through thanks to the trouble with the other short fax, so, instead of trying to send the whole thing, I print it all out and then sift through the printouts to just grab the relevant pages. It's still something like 20-30 pages though.
- Ask my girlfriend, who is an office manager at another company, if she can do the faxing and babysitting for me because her desk is next to a fax machine (i.e., she can do work and fax at the same time, unlike me who has to walk down the hall).
- My girlfriend says "yes, no problem, I'll just hook up my sheet-feed scanner and E-fax the whole thing. We recently switched from a physical fax machine to an e-fax subscription." Awesome, I say, thanks. I'd do that myself, but for the fact that I have no money in my bank accounts to pay for an e-fax subscription.
- She tries for two days and can't get through. Dude never gets the faxes she sent. E-fax appears to have gotten the faxes but has not sent her either a delivery confirmation nor a delivery failure message (usually you get one or the other). She ends up on tech support with E-fax who says, oh yeah, the version of the e-fax client you're using has bugs under Windows 7, so you'll seem to have trouble getting through. Just forget the client and go through the web interface.
- All this time Dude is saying "I'm not getting the faxes. Are you trying to send too many pages? Maybe send them in smaller chunks."
- Finally my girlfriend solves the problems with her e-fax account and it gets through.
- Dude says "I got the pages finally, we'll take care of this." (And they eventually did.)
- Dude, you should make sure your fax machine has paper in it, we had a hell of a time getting these faxes to you.
- Dude says "Oh, no, there's no paper. All my faxes come in PDF form, arriving in my email inbox via E-fax."
- *head asplode*
I'm having trouble actually counting the number of analog-to-digital conversions that those tax returns had to go to in order to reach the dude, when I should have just been able to email him the PDFS. All because of some strange draconian thing preventing them from making use of the technology they already have.
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