'Tis the season to display one of my greatest natural talents: Terrifying my accountant with a personal visit. Yes, it’s tax time.
Judging from the way she clutches her temples and one eye spins, a year isn’t quite enough time for my CPA to recover from last year’s appointment. She’s not great with creative types.
“Where are your shoeboxes?” Melissa asks, pressing her hair against her head so it won’t fall out.
With more than 1.2 million professionals who decipher 72,000 pages of U.S. tax laws for a living, she really could be a little nicer. I’m sure at least three of them would be happy to have my shoeboxes as clients. Besides, I upgraded to Tupperware three years ago.
“Let’s review,” Melissa says. “Your dogs are not dependents, so doggie day care and femur bones are not deductible. You own a home, so if we multiply your weight in grams by last year’s millage increase…”
This is where we part ways. The harder I study her mouth moving, the fuzzier the sound gets. The room starts spinning, and she asks: “If my condo has 27 doorknobs and you have six cookies, how many rhinos eat pizza?”
To the right-brained, the answer is obvious: “Oprah, since zombies can’t fly.”
By now, Melissa knows she’s lost me. The language barrier has kicked in, which is my father’s fault. Math wasn’t his native tongue, either.
My late dad was a musician who traveled around the country when I was little. Mom and I wouldn’t see him for months at a time, but he always made sure she had enough money to run the house. During one trip, he left her with $119 in the checkbook. That was enough to buy a small island back then, so he figured we’d be OK. And we would have been, except for the decimal point.
Being a musician, he understood the value of dots on a staff, where each one dictated the precise amount of time to hold a note. There was no room for error. The slightest miscalculation might cause the entire band to implode. But in a checkbook, Dad wasn’t as fussy about where dots go. So he left Mom with $1.19 by mistake.
The poor man immediately lost all his checkbook rights and spent the next 60 years apologizing to my mathematical mother for his unforgivable error.
But it wasn’t his fault. My dad was an HMA long before the malady was diagnosed. HMAs are gifted individuals— largely humor writers, artists and their fathers—who suffer from High Math Anxiety. These delicate creatures might erupt in hives at the slightest exposure to algebraic equations. Prolonged contact could be fatal.
According to cbsnews.com, which reported on a groundbreaking study, the mere suggestion of an impending math problem caused HMAs measurable agony and “a rush of activity in parts of the brain associated with pain perception, including the dorso-posterior insula and mid-cingulate cortex.” Translation: Math hurts. Scientific brain scans said so.
I presented this study to Melissa in the Tupperware container with the orange lid, hoping she’d offer a discount, or at least spring for some calamine lotion.
It’s only fair. She and her 120.002 million billion beancounting peers give taxpayers hives (Let’s let her worry about the decimal point.)
Jan A. Igoe was never her math teacher’s pet or accountant’s favorite client. But her allergist loves her. Write her here.