Broken Computer

This is the first year managing my finances on my new computer.  It was time to gather up all my tax info, and I must admit, this year I wasn’t as efficient as I have been in the past.  I spent hours gathering up all the lists of expenses regarding the rental of my house in Milton (everything from bank statements to emails), plus hunting for last year’s charitable tax receipts – that really freaked me out, as I always just save those e-receipts in a folder in Outlook, and retrieve them at tax time.  It seems that at some point in the last 18 months Outlook decided to start archiving all emails older than x-number of weeks or months – I didn’t know that, took ages to finally stumble across them.  And my sister, who has been great at being my ‘post office’ in Canada, chose for some reason to scan and save all my T3’s and T5’s upside down (Adobe Reader wouldn’t let me flip them).  But eventually I downloaded all the necessary documentation, and created a detailed summary page of my rental finances.  All ready to fire off to the accountant.

The next day, my 4-month old computer wouldn’t start.  At all.  Just one, big, blue, stuck screen. I got on a FaceTime call with Currys’ Customer Service (think Best Buy) and once I explained to the young man from Birmingham exactly where Orkney was, we realised I was going to have to wait two weeks until I move south, to take my computer in to be fixed.  It will be free, and there’s an outlet just a short drive from Braidwood, so no biggy.

It was later that day I remembered my taxes.  Yes, I’d downloaded all the documents, but I hadn’t got around to uploading them to the cloud.  So, every single solitary piece of tax documentation was locked in the new, dead PC. But all was not lost.  Because I’m a boomer, as I was collating all the expenses, etc, I had written them down.  On paper.  An old-fashioned piece of paper.  See the benefits of rocking it old school?  What had taken hours the day before, took 30 minutes the second time ‘round, and the accountant now has all she needs to get me my $85.00 return.

Oh, and my sister is wonderful, and I am supremely grateful to her for all she’s done on my behalf while I’ve been away. There, that should cover it.