A grandma is with her little granddaughter (about three or four), sitting at a table I’m serving. It’s a small café, so I can easily overhear their conversation.

Grandma: “I have something very important to ask you, and I hope you feel you can tell me.”

Granddaughter: “Okay, Grandma.”

Grandma: “Are you a Jedi or a Sith?”

Granddaughter: *As completely serious as a little kid can be.* “I’m a Jedi.”

Grandma: *Beaming smile.* “Awesome! Me too!”

They proceed to giggle for at least two minutes.

I am working the checkout line at Costco. A man reaches the front of my queue with a cart overflowing. I reach out my hand for his card.

Me: “Good afternoon! Could I see your membership card, please?”

Customer: “I don’t have one. Just ring me up.”

Me: “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re a membership-only warehouse. I can’t open a transaction without scanning a valid card.”

Customer: *Voice rising immediately.* “Are you kidding me? I’m standing here with hundreds of dollars’ worth of stuff! You’re going to turn away money because I don’t have a piece of plastic?”

Me: “It’s our store policy, sir. It’s how we keep our prices low. If you’d like, you can head over to the membership desk and sign up right now.”

Customer: “I am sick of this! Everything is a membership or a subscription these days! I have to pay for Netflix, I have to pay for Amazon, I have to pay for my gym, and now you want me to pay for the ‘privilege’ of buying my own groceries? It’s a scam! It’s all a corporate scam!”

Me: “I understand the frustration, but it’s literally the business model of the store. How did you get past the greeter at the front door?”

Customer: “That doesn’t matter! This is America! I should be able to buy a f****** cheese without being on a government-style registry!”

A manager, hearing the shouting, walks over and tries to de-escalate.

Manager: “Is there a problem here, sir?”

Customer: “Yes! Your employee is refusing to take my money because I’m not a ‘member’ of your little cult! I just want my groceries!”

Manager: “Sir, the membership is what allows us to operate. Without it, we aren’t authorized to process the sale. It’s the same for everyone in this building.”

Customer: “Well, the customer is always right, and the customer says his money is green! Just hit the ‘skip’ button or whatever you do for people who aren’t sheep!”

Manager: “Sir, there is no ‘skip’ button for the foundational pillar of the store’s global business strategy.”

Customer: “Fine! Keep your stupid chicken! I’m going to the Walmart down the street where they don’t treat food like a VIP nightclub!”

He storms out, leaving the full cart behind. I look at my manager.

Me: “There’s a Walmart down the street?”

Manager: “Kinda. It’s a Sam’s Club.”

Me: “Walmart’s membership-only warehouse club?”

Manager: “Oh, to be a fly on THAT wall…”

I work in payroll. When a worker wants to have a certain amount of money withheld from their taxes (or not), they have to fill out a form called a W-4 that states how much they want withheld.

In the old days, this was very simple: Workers counted how many dependents they had, wrote down a number based on that, and everybody got either a small refund at the end of the year, or a big one if they had the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Credit.

A few years back, we had a president, a guy named Donald Trump, who went and changed the withholding tables. Now you don’t count how many kids you have, you count the number of kids and multiply it by 2,000. You don’t just subtract one if you work another job; you have to calculate for yourself how much to withhold based on how much you expect to make at your other job.

This math is beyond most of our employees.

So then I started constantly getting complaints every April about how people’s refunds were too small.

I mentioned this to the director of the department, and I guess somehow that got everyone sent to a promotional speaker who explained that rich people don’t want refunds, they want to owe the government a small amount of money every year, so they’re not getting an interest-free loan.

I doubt that the interest on a thousand dollars for four months is worth much more than $20, but this got all of our employees fired up. So, they all changed their W-4s again and are now looking forward to owing money at tax time.

We have one employee, let’s call him Kevin. That’s not his name, I just like the way it sounds.

Kevin is 29, married to a woman who’s physically disabled, and has 7 kids with her. Kevin gets a truly gargantuan tax refund every year. Kevin has never before complained to me about his W-4s, or his withholding, or anything else: Kevin has zero federal and zero state withholding.

He does not give the government an interest-free loan of his money, as he doesn’t give them a single dollar of his money.

This year, just like everyone else, he comes in and changes his W4 in the hopes that this will make him owe at the end of the year. He’s excited for it! He wants the extra money in his pocket each paycheck.

Kevin does not notice at the time that his paycheck has not become any larger. His withholding is already zero.

April comes around, and for once, I get almost no complaints about people’s refunds. Everyone either got their Earned Income Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit refund, or owed about a thousand, and was weirdly happy about it.

Not Kevin. Kevin didn’t want a refund. Kevin wanted to go in. Kevin was P***ED.

He called me and complained for hours, calling back when I shut him down for not being productive, that he’d set things up to owe in, that he’d been told that he’d get more money by owing in, that he didn’t see a penny of more money during the year and now he has to suffer the indignity of giving the government an interest free loan?!

My patience is out. I tell him over and over that he’s not prepaid the government anything. I tell him over and over that the motivational speaker was not speaking about his situation. I tell him over and over that with his income and number of children, it’s impossible not to get a massive refund from the government.

Kevin’s been wasting my time for three or four days now, trying to talk me into somehow paying him for his Earned Income Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit in advance on his payroll. I’ve called his manager to explain and get him under control. I’ve called his and my department heads about the situation to try to get someone else to step in. I’ve asked for the duty of repeating these same facts to Kevin over and over to be passed on to someone on his management team, so I can do the god-d*** job I’m actually being paid for instead of arguing on the phone with a moron. Finally, on the recorded line, he utters a threat. “I’m gonna f****** beat you up if you don’t get me my money now.”

I’m exhausted and tired. This is exactly my ticket to no more Kevin.

So I report the threat and have him fired.

Do I feel good about it? No. Has he always been a good worker, up until now? Yes. Does he have seven kids to care for at home? Also yes.

But god-d***-it, it’s my job to make sure everyone working here gets paid correctly, I have about twenty people justifiably riding my a** about overtime pay that vanished into some sort of glitch in the system, which is an emergency, and a hundred more who somehow managed to operate our time system incorrectly and need a clock adjustment, which is not, and a hundred more tasks to complete in order to make sure everyone actually gets paid, all of which are much more important than explaining how taxes and withholding work to a guy who doesn’t want to listen.

Related:
Taxing Taxing, Part 27
Taxing Taxing, Part 26
Taxing Taxing, Part 25
Taxing Taxing, Part 24
Taxing Taxing, Part 23

Me: *On the phone.* “Sorry, I’m afraid that due to the store closing, our print center is permanently closed.”

Caller: “Okay. Will it be open on Friday?”

While I was in college, I got an unpaid internship working for Human Resources in a company headquartered in Austin. This meshed well with my major.

On my first day, AS AN INTERN, I was asked by the senior managers to select people to fire in a particular department.

Me: “I’m sorry, what?”

Senior HR Manager: “The company is overstaffed. We’ve got to fire some people to make budget. We’re asking each intern to take a different department and select a few people to fire.”

Me: “Is this just, like, a practice assignment? Someone’s going to be double-checking and looking over it, right?”

Senior HR Manager: “No. None of us particularly want to do it; firing people is awkward. You’ll also have to handle the exit interviews, of course, and get their termination paperwork put together and handed to them.”

Me: “You’re… You’re joking, right? Am I on Candid Camera or something? This can’t be real.”

Senior HR Manager: “Calm down. Relax. Have a glass of water. You won’t be here when the summer ends anyway, so any anger or grudges they bear won’t come down on you.”

Me: “But…”

But I got redirected to sit at my assigned desk.

I thought about it. Lord help me, I looked over the files they had and actually considered things as best I could. But… it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel right for them to ask an unpaid intern to do their dirty work. It didn’t feel right doing the dirty work for such abject cowards.

At the end of the day, I approached senior management with a small packet — still hoping it was a joke.

Senior HR Manager: “You’ve made the selections?”

Me: “Yes. Would you like to look over them?”

Senior HR Manager: “Not particularly. Just do it.”

Me: “Okay.”

So, I did.

And that’s the story of how I processed my own termination paperwork — and nobody else’s.

Related:
‘Cause You’re An Intern, WA DA DA WAP WA DAAAAAA! Part 4
‘Cause You’re An Intern, WA DA DA WAP WA DAAAAAA! Part 3
‘Cause You’re An Intern, WA DA DA WAP WA DAAAAAA! Part 2
‘Cause You’re An Intern, WA DA DA WAP WA DAAAAAA!