Death and...

Taxes! Oh shit! I claimed 99 dependents all last year!

I did it because I was working overtime, and every time I’d grab some extra hours Uncle Sam would stick his fingers in the cookie jar. I work hard at the cookie factory, checking to make sure there are a thousand chocolate chips in every bag of Chips Ahoy. Some extra hours should translate to some extra cookies, but Uncle Sam is reaching into the jar. Those are my fucking cookies, asshole!

So I find myself running the Oreo Goo Squirter™, working on the new prototype experimental Oreo flavor.... grape..., when a coworker leans over and says, “Hey, you’ve been working a lot of overtime recently, right?”

“Yeah,” I quipped, “What’s it to you, chief?”

“Well, you getting good money for that?”

“No,” I shrugged, “The taxes.... they.... they take away my moneys”

“Why don’t you claim 99 dependents? They don’t take out taxes if they think you have 99 dependents.”

“But isn’t it really fucking obvious that you didn’t, all of a sudden, get 99 dependents? And besides, isn’t claiming 99 dependents kinda like fibbin’?”

“No,” he assured me, “Fibbin’ is what the government does when it tells you the taxes it collects are going to good use.”

“I dunno”

“Well fuck you then,” he said, “I’m just trying to help, and you’re sittin’ there being a sissy bitch about it.”

And that last part really made me stop and smell the roses. Was I being a bitch? Did I need to claim 99 dependents?

As surely as I knew more money meant more beer, I decided to claim 99. “Just for this week,” I thought. It was a heavy overtime week, and I really wanted that money. “I’ll switch it back when I go back to working 40 hours per week.”

Well, when the regular week started, I noticed that I was getting more money for that too. I was like a heroin addict, except it was like I was shooting up money instead of heroin. I couldn’t stop. I had grown to love my 99 dependents as if they were real children. I had even named them all. No I didn’t.

That was then. This is now. Tax day. Either I find a way to claim 99 dependents, or I gotta pay a huge whack of money. Does my dog count as a dependent? My couch? My empty beers cans?

I’m fucked.