Posts with mood worried but hopeful (1)
My eventful day
Mood: worried but hopeful
Music: Coldplay - "Trouble"
Posted on 2005-03-10 12:36:00
Tags: taxcenter
Words: 680
Doesn't that sound like it should be the title of a middle-school essay? Anyway, yesterday was quite eventful for me - nothing earth-shattering, just a lot of atypical things. So I thought I'd share them.
Morning was pretty uninteresting, except I'm just starting on a new project that looks like it's going to be difficult and I'm worried about completing in the time I said I could. Plus it's at a weird intersection of like three different things, so there are few people who can really help me on it. We'll see how it goes...
Barbara was in town for spring break (she left this morning), so she, Jonathan, David and I met for lunch at Bangkok Cuisine, which I hadn't been to. It was pretty good stuff! We had the lunch buffet. With fried bananas. Mmm...
Then I did some more unproductive work, and left around 3:00 for our release party (we released a bunch of stuff in January, yay!) It was at Austin's Park 'n Pizza, which I hadn't been to, but it's a pretty cool place, kinda like Celebration Station. I was a little wary of the whole thing (we had been assigned teams for "team-building exercises"), but we played laser tag and did go-karts, which was a lot of fun. After that we were free to do what we wanted, but I had to leave to go volunteer at the tax center.
Volunteering was...well, it was really depressing. I only saw two people. (being delibrately kinda vague here for privacy reasons) The first was a lady who didn't make much money and had lost her job in October and hadn't found one yet. (at least she came to us instead of going to H & R Block like she had done last year) She was obviously lonely and so she chatted with me for a while, but she seemed sad. Not only that, but although she got a decent refund, she owed the IRS back taxes, and so all of it was going to them (and she still owed them more). So that was depressing.
The second was a lady with a really complicated return - she lived in Massachusetts and had moved down here in 2004, so I told her we couldn't do the Massachusetts state taxes. We did the federal ones, though, and things seemed to be going fine (she got a decent refund). But she knew that she was going to owe state taxes, and so she wanted to send the info to her daughter, who's going to school there, so she could file for her (I didn't know if you can do this or what). And then she just sounded more and more desperate, and she said she was leaving the country soon to work at KBR (sounded like she was going to Iraq), and she didn't want her daughter to know, but she really needed the money.
So I left the tax center really really depressed, and grabbed some food on the way home, and listened to Frou Frou in the car. Frou Frou is great great stuff, and it helped some. I got home and met up with David, Barbara and Teresa & Lucas, who is as cute as ever (he's really growing - he can understand commands now and stuff. Fun!). So we played with him for a while, then Teresa & Lucas left and Christi and David showed up, so we chatted for a while, then played a game. Later we watched some TV with Barbara & Jonathan. Anyway, I guess the point was that it was nice to just hang out with friends and such - we haven't been doing a lot of that lately for various reasons (mostly other people's reasons, really)
So now I'm worried about my project again since I can't seem to make any progress at all. Hopefully that will change soon.
I see amorphousplasma has an on-site interview at NI - good luck! I'd be happy to talk to you about the whole experience, except I really have no idea what tech writer interviews are like. But the weekend is fun... :-)
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