Mail forwarding

I don’t like change. I do pretty much the same thing every week, eating about the same food, walking about the same route with my dog, watching the same shows, living in the same place, and working at the same job.

Most people would be horrified by my general “sameness” throughout the year. But you know what? You know the one time of year when I get to laugh at all of those people that like “change” and to do things “differently”?

Tax time.

It's here, baby. And if you are one of those people who likes “change” in your career and life, you can have your change along with all of those different W-2s you need to chase down. Ha. My tax return has about four lines on it, most of which are exactly the same as last year. And the year before it.  

I always laugh--mostly in shocked disbelief--at some of the resumes that come across my desk and the absolutely insane number of jobs some people have in a year. I saw one resume once that had--no joke--fourteen jobs in two years. FOURTEEN! How the heck? I mean, I know how the heck, but seriously. When it comes to tax time, how does one even attempt to figure out if you got all your W2s from every damn job you worked over the last calendar year when you've had fourteen jobs in two years?

Anyway, that poor soul only tangentially relates to this post, and his usefulness as a trope has been spent. Moving on.

My company mails out all W-2s for every contractor that made even a cent with us in the previous calendar year before the last week in January.

[Sidenote: Why do some people call looking for their W-2s in the first week of January? And why would you make a tax appointment before you have all your shit together? Don't get pissed at me on the phone when you tell me your tax appointment is tomorrow and you haven't gotten your W-2 yet.]

All W-2s are mailed out before the last week in January. All W-2s that bounce back to us for whatever reason are stuck in a pile as we wait for the angry contractor to call demanding where their W-2 is and blame us for not automatically knowing that they moved at some point in the last twelve months. (Yay! Change!) We start offering W-2 reprints beginning the second week of February if someone doesn't get their W-2 (again, for whatever reason), and it never bounced back to our office. For any reprints, we always verify the address the contractor would like us to send the reprint (shocking how many people don't understand that an apartment number is actually part of your address) just to make sure it's going to the right place.

I came into work one morning to see a text from a contractor that said: That's BS because I have mail forwarding. Cursed with an insatiable curiosity—and also because it was my job—I looked into what-on-God’s-green-earth the gal could possibly have been referring to. Shockingly, the contractor was miffed she hadn't received her W-2, calling “BS” on the fact that we told her it was mailed out via USPS to the address we had on file.

[Sidenote: Trust me, lady, I'm completely uninterested in keeping your W-2 from you and have absolutely no reason to lie about whether we sent them out already. Odds are the problem is on your end.]

Before I shoot off a professionally nasty, "Ok, you dumb broad. We totally lied about mailing your W-2 and are intentionally keeping it from you because we enjoy having your entitled self reaming us a new one for no reason" text reply, I do a bit of Googling since there's no note in her file indicating the W-2 had bounced back to us.

<Types into Google> "When does USPS mail forwarding not work?"

Fun fact: According to Google, the USPS will not forward certain documents like bank statements or other federal forms. For these “important” documents, the updated address from the recipient is required in order for the form to be sent on to ensure they are being received by the correct, intended recipient.

Said another way: USPS doesn't automatically forward every document that goes through the post office. But, since I also was not interested in explaining that to someone who would simply continue to argue with me because she's the kind of person who knows everything, I asked my coworker how I should reply to the text with the knowledge that federal tax documents will not, in fact, be forwarded on.

My coworker's reply? "We mailed your W-2 out to the address we have on file. Any mail forwarding issues you might be experiencing need to be discussed with your local USPS office. For any other concerns regarding your W-2, please give us a call."

I typed this fantastically unhelpful-yet-perfect response into our message app, realizing all the while that the next time I receive an equivalent, completely unhelpful customer service reply when I’m on the other end of the phone….I should probably do a bit of googling myself to make sure the answer to my problem isn’t as equally obvious as this one. Maybe that customer service rep is the equivalent of ME, and I'm the idiot in his/her blog?

Naaahhh. Couldn’t be. Could I?