Rant #2,594: Wrong

Well, my family’s taxes were completed yesterday.
 
The good news is that our son did pretty well.
 
The bad news is that my wife and I did not do too well, mainly because of my situation during the past year.
 
We truly got zonked, period.
 
I made out the checks to pay what we owe—truly disgraceful for someone who was out of work for virtually the entire year—and they will be out of here as soon as I can get to the post office this morning.
 
I also made sure that my Social Security payments are in order, too, so that our 2021 taxes maybe will be a bit more forgiving than our 2020 taxes were.
 
But honestly, who knows at this point?
 
I knew were going to get hit this year, as many families will, due to pandemic-related tax situations that presented themselves in the past very unusual year.
 
But we got zonked because of my situation, and that makes me boiling mad, but there really is nothing that could have been done about it.
 
It is what it is, but hopefully, 2021 won’t be as bad as 2020 was. That is all we can hope, and I mean across the board, including tax-wise.
 
Now I am going to sequeway to something that you just can’t smoothly sequeway to, but I am going to do it anyway.
 
After our taxes were done, it was late in the afternoon, so we went to the drive through at one popular fast food place, the only one my wife will eat the food from.
 
Lately, every time I go to this place and use the drive-through, there is a problem with my order; they leave out things, don’t give us what we ordered—and I mean totally screw up the order—or they tell me I am done without giving me my change—I kid you not.
 
Most recently, I went there with my mother after she got her second coronavirus vaccine shot, and they so totally messed up the order—telling me one price at the drive-up order screen and another, higher price when I got to the window--that I actually asked the guy at the window, “Do you know what you are doing?” and when we finally got home, the order was still completely messed up, giving us MORE than we ordered.
 
Anyway, se went there yesterday, and there was no one on line. We drove right up, placed our order, picked it up, and pretty much held our collective breath that the order was filled.
 
We got home, and emptied the bag of food out on the table. Everything seemed right … until we got to the chicken nuggets.
 
We ordered one extra four-piece spicy chicken nuggets and one extra four-piece regular nuggets, but they gave us two regular four piece chicken nuggets with no spicy ones in sight.
 
Well, we can almost shrug that off, although my wife is fond of their spicy nuggets.
 
But then the piece de resistance of total incompetence …
 
I bit into my sandwich, and I noticed that something was not right, it simply did not taste the way it ordinarily does.
 
I swallowed the first bite, and then opened up the sandwich—there was no hamburger in there, but there was a chicken patty in my sandwich.
 
Regular readers of this column know that I hate chicken, abhor this fowl, and would not eat it under any circumstances.
 
Well, I ordered a hamburger and I got chicken. Even the wrapper said “Hamburger.”
 
You know, after getting zonked with taxes, I had no strength to call up the place and tell them that they gave me the wrong sandwich like I have in the past … and yes, this is not the first time that this has happened.
 
So I dutifully ate my chicken sandwich, because I was both hungry and defeated, two things you do not want to be separately and definitely don’t want to be in tandem with each other.
 
And then I wrote out the checks for the taxes, which further put me in a shimmy.
 
I fell asleep at about 8:30 p.m., which was no surprise based on the agita I had both in my stomach and my head.
 
I feel that I just cannot win.
 
Everything I do that is right ends up being wrong.
 
Maybe I should just sit home with my hands folded all day … and somehow that will turn out wrong too.
 
Onward and upward!