Author: Richy B.

Here’s the *exact* transcript of a phone call I just received:
-RING- (yep, I got it on the first ring)
Me: Hello?
Caller: Hello – who is this?
Me: May I ask who is calling?
Caller: Sorry, I think I’ve got the wrong number.
Me: Yes. Bye
-click-

If this conversation is familiar and you called somebody at 20:04 on Saturday 19th of Feb 2005 from a mobile telephone number ending in 775 (with a total of five 7’s in the number), then hello! And thanks the the baffling call!

Aargh – a day after I receive my login details for the Inland Revenue (tax office) Self Assessment system, they send me a reminder saying I need to submit my tax return by the end of this month or pay a £100 fine. I thought I had to the end of the financial year (April). Gulp.

So I’ve had to spend the last 3 hours gathering all my receipts, P60s, bank statements etc to complete my tax return. The fun part is I put things like that in “a safe place” so they don’t get lost (legally I’ve got to retain them for 10 years!) – but I can’t always remember where the safe place is 🙁 . Anyway, found them, filled in the 10+ page tax return online and for the last 40 minutes I’ve been waiting for the tax office’s system to accept the return.

I filled it in on their website, clicked “continue/submit” a number of times and now I’ve got to wait ages for it to submit something to itself?

I could wait, but as I’ve got £45.78 of outstanding tax to pay (last year the tax office owed me money), I want to get it all cleared. But I can’t have the “tax reference code” from the tax office until the system has submitted the data to itself – grrr…

And there I was planning an enjoyable night “out on the town” tonight. Bah humbug!