A while ago I refigured my US taxes and realized I was actually owed a fair chunk of change more than I had thought. I also discovered that non-citizens are not allowed to file electronically, presumably for fear that we will somehow infect the IRS computers with terrorism. This meant I needed paper forms from my former employer. The paper forms needed to be sent to me the old-fashioned way.
So, around Wednesday, I realized that trusting my former employer to put something in an envelope, write an address on it, and put it in the mail might be construed as negligent - or the forms might have just been eaten by a whale en route. After a modest amount of cajoling, I managed to get them to authorize and send me an electronic version, which was relatively easy once I'd gotten them to admit that there was such a thing as an electronic version. Anyway, problem solved, return ready to file, four days before deadline. Except that Australia closes down completely over the four-day Easter weekend. Nothing is open on Good Friday except for pubs, and even they all close at 10 PM and are unreliable when it comes to delivering the mail. Post offices reopen and mail delivery recommences on Tuesday, one day too late for my purposes. However, I thought, surely the efficient whirling cogs of private enterprise will not let me down. After all these weeks of midnight phone calls to offices on the East Coast that will be closed by the time I wake up for work, tedious negotiations with former employers, etc, all I have to do is get something in the mail within the next hundred or so hours. Surely this can be done.
Saturday morning, I jog down to my local FedEx branch. After all, even if the post offices are closed for no very good reason, and it costs a little extra, I can at least be confident that I'll have a record that I mailed the thing off in time. Local FedEx repository is closed. A little disquieting, but I slow my pace and head for the center of the city, reasoning that there absolutely has to be some way of mailing something in the city of Sydney on a Saturday. Downtown there is another FedEx branch. It is open. I smile broadly and skip to the counter.
Here was my trivia lesson - and final straw - for the day: FedEx won't ship to PO boxes or non-street addresses in the US from foreign countries. This, to me, makes no sense whatsoever. The guy was not unsympathetic, but was adamant that they would not deliver my tax return. "Australia post," he said. "Tuesday." Offers of bribery and disquisitions to the effect that it is completely ludicrous for a modern industrialized country to just cease operating for four days like this did not move him.
The tax return is sitting in the corner of my desk, as it has been all week, staring at me victoriously. Technically, the feds stop owing you your refund three years after the return comes due. However, since literally every single other rule in the system has a clause built into it to screw foreigners, I'm assuming that "three years" can be interpreted as "thirty seconds" as and when it becomes convenient, say just after midnight on Monday. The tax return may think it has the upper hand, but I am more determined than that. On Tuesday the 18th, I am going out to buy a carrier pigeon, shove my tax return up its ass, point it towards Philadelphia, and release. Failing that, I am going to burn the fucking thing.