Moving in Stereo

The 80s brought us a decade of good movies and even better music.  This particular track was from a famous movie with an even more memorable scene from that movie.  Bonus points if you can name the movie and segment it’s from.

Candy-O

I burned through 2 tape cassettes of this album, and then later, the CD.  Now I just have it on mp3.   This is Number 1 in my Top 5 albums.

Records Retention

When I was in school, I kept my important documents in a portable, plastic filing box. Mostly the box contained prOn tax returns and pay stubs because my parents kept copies of the really important stuff –loans, promissory notes and such. At least I assumed they did. My mother had a designated spot in her bedside night table where she stored current monthly bills, but I don’t think she ever retained anything that wasn’t going to result in the house being foreclosed upon or the car repossessed should the bill not be paid.

My parents conducted their personal finances and stored their records in much the same way that they parented – out of their asses. But, surprisingly, the bills were paid in a timely manner, and, the IRS, or any other government entity charged with collecting money from delinquent accounts, never darkened our mailbox. I guess my parents’ tax returns weren’t sufficiently interesting to be audited, and, the fact that they spent decades at the same address, paying the same monthly bills, year after year, never spawned any further attempts to squeeze any further taxes out of them.

And then there’s me.

Movin’ On Up

From the moment I moved out of that backwoods armpit of a town, I have been assailed with numerous attempts by tax collectors to strong-arm me into paying various occupational fees and other personal taxes. You see, when you relocate from bumblefuck, nowhere, that’s one less sucker taxpayer there is to finance the hyper-inflated salaries of the school board, and, the ever burgeoning population of oldsters. And they will do almost anything to keep the tax monies flowing from the residents who actually have jobs. If that includes chasing down a former resident for imaginary fees, then so be it. And if you happen to be an uninformed, former resident who also doesn’t keep personal financial records, then you’re their favorite target. You can look forward to an annual written threat of fines and/or penalties and/or prison.

Two decades and several states later, I continue to receive notices from my state of origin threatening to assess fines and penalties if payment is not forthcoming for various, mythical personal taxes that only exist in the mind of the collector.  There is a hanging file folder in my cabinet dedicated specifically to these notices that I call the Don’t Get Cute With Me file.  Once I am able to stop myself from laughing uncontrollably upon reading a notice, I typically respond with my own nastigram to the issuing body.

Some years they skip sending me a bill, I suppose, because the tax collector has either slacked off or the state just doesn’t need the money. I’m not quite sure what the reason is. Or maybe they just need a break from reading my retina-searing responses to their solicitations. I do so enjoy ramming irrefutable evidence to the contrary down their collective, bottom-feeding gullet.

I used to get angry about the notices, but now I am merely amused because it makes me wonder how many other dolphins the state has snagged in its tuna net. I know that I can’t be the only one , but I can believe that I’m probably one of the very few who keeps personal business records indefinitely. And now, thanks to the likes of Bernanke and Goldman Sachs, et al., the entire U.S. economy is circling the bowl, which means that it’s probably quite prudent for you to retain your personal financial records.

Keep Your Records

Many state and local governments are either completely broke or about to be insolvent, and, consequently, are desperately struggling to find income.  Some cities are becoming quite creative in their quest for revenue, so don’t be surprised if a collection notice shows up in your mailbox for a long forgotten and since paid-for citation from a city that you lived in decades ago.

You remember the plastic file box that I used to keep – the same one that held, at most, half a dozen file folders? I have since graduated to metal filing cabinets. And while I used to just shove my documents into a folder just for the sake of storing everything in one, known place, now I neatly file everything from bank statements to monthly bills to tax returns in reverse chronological order and use a two-hole puncher to organize papers in fastener folders. I even print out labels.

I spend my life filing whether at home or on the job because I am a Paralegal by trade,  and, so I retain personal financial documentation above and beyond what some small business owners do because I refuse to be shaken down.  And what’s more, I retain those records indefinitely despite any guidelines issued by the Feds and/or State. Of course, such a comprehensive retention policy may result in having to rent storage space to accommodate your files, but I have found that via the abracadabra of electronic document scanning, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Provided that you back up your electronic files to physical media such as a CD-R, you need not worry about your hard drive crashing and/or the blue screen of death. All that you really have to worry about  -after you scan your docs- is keeping an index since you won’t be able to dig through a box of discs in quite the same manner as you would a filing cabinet.

Your mileage may vary as to what level of priority you attribute to your own records, but personally, I don’t place even a single scintilla of trust in either financial entities and/or government bureaucracies to not screw me over and otherwise attempt to bleed every last nickel out of my paycheck based on their fraudulent record keeping endeavors.

Happy hole punching.

©2010 Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™ with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Oorah for Me

Above referenced is the wage claim I mentioned a few days ago.  Pertinent information has been redacted to preserve the privacy of the parties involved.  All you need to know is that I beat the greedy prick.

Sometimes, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight that matters as much as the size of the fight in the dog.

©2009-2011 Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™ with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 

 

Next Week in the Spotlight

Guest post by blogger Lena Toporikova from The Colors Magazine.

Vanishing Cream

From the 1996 album entitled Devil Thumbs A Ride by the Houston based band The Hunger.  A most excellent selection.

Raised on the Radio

I learned to play guitar while the other boys were busy learning math
But all the simplest equations never add up very far And all my musical persuasions kept me reaching for the stars…

The Ravyns were a band from Baltimore with their 1982 one-hit wonder featured in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

Sausalito Summer Night

Diesel was a one-hit wonder Dutch band that hit the American charts in 1981 with this tune.   It’s nice to see it available as a downloadable mp3.

I’m Not Your Man

Tommy Conwell was a harder rocking version of The Hooters, but the album Rumble made it to the top of the charts in 1985.

And Fools Shine On

Outstanding song from the outstanding 1995 album, Seeds.  If you don’t have this one yet, you should pick it up as an mp3 download.  All of the tracks rock.

Odyssey of a Wage Claim

Click to enlarge

NOTE:  If you would like to view the official case file for help with your own wage claim, then please contact me offline  for details.  I will make available my materials for a nominal fee.

Not that any further evidence is needed that the State of California is in the toilet, the above referenced image is a timeline of how long it will take should an employee need to file a wage claim against his deadbeat employer for nonpayment.  Of course, for 2010, the wait time is probably longer because the State is a lot more broke than it was last February.

Referring to the image, you can see that you will be waiting quite some time just to receive an initial hearing date.  Hopefully, you didn’t actually need the money your deadbeat employer owes you because you will probably never see it.  At least not in the short term.  Perhaps later, when the Judgment is attached as alien to his estate when the greedy, old, prick croaks, and, if the State has located all the money he has hidden from the IRS so as to avoid paying the appropriate taxes on his salary, but most assuredly not any time soon.

After the initial hearing, you will then wait several more months for the conference.  After waiting five (5) months to get the conference date, the DLSE continued mine from mid-December to mid-January.  It was awfully thoughtful to give themselves a break for the holidays, don’t you think?

Once you attend the conference, a Judgment will be rendered by the Labor Commission in fifteen (15) days, or so I was told.  Thereafter, assuming Judgment was made in your favor, the Franchise Tax Board will then go after the deadbeat to attempt collection of the debt.   If the deadbeat ignores those attempts, the debt then goes into collections just like any other debt.

Realistically, I realize that I can’t get blood from a stone, or in this case, from a deadbeat douche who not only willfully bounced my paycheck, but also, did not bother to pay state or federal taxes on my salary despite having removed them.  However, I filed the claim simply because sometimes, in the absence of having the avaricious cocksucker’s legs broken,  you just have to fight on the principle of the matter.

Update

Please see Oorah for Me for the outcome of this case.

Disclaimer:  Not all wage claims will result in judgment for the plaintiff. Retaining legal counsel is not a requirement, however, be aware that filing the claim in pro per will be challenging if you are not familiar with how it works, particularly in calculating what is owed.  Your mileage can and will vary, but if you’re going to go at it alone, then make sure you thoroughly read and comprehend the Labor Commissioner’s website on procedure.

Additionally, I am a Paralegal with previous Employment Law experience, and, am well versed in form completion, drafting and submitting wage claims. Plus I’m just one of those people that if you’re going to knock me down, then you better make sure I stay down because when I get back up, your ass is grass and I’m the lawn mower.  This characteristic helps immensely when dealing with douches who are accustomed to screwing over employees with impunity.

That my previous douche employer did not bother to respond to the Labor Commissioner throughout the course of an entire year only made the case a slam dunk for me.   Essentially, the employer slit his own throat by ignoring official correspondence that was legally served upon him.  But the Labor Commissioner would have found in my favor even if said employer had appeared at any of the hearings simply because it is not an option to whine about personal issues and use it as an affirmative defense for not paying employees.

©2009-2011 Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™ with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Another Douchebag Banker

In 1993, a successful Ukiah, California business couple -Viola and Oscar Allen- having no living heirs, set up a trust fund so that female graduates of Ukiah High School wishing to pursue a career in medical studies would have a perpetual scholarship available to them. The Allens then appointed James L. Harrison, 62, former VP of the local Savings Bank of Mendocino County, as trustee. But instead of distributing the trust assets after their deaths to the scholarship, Mr. Harrison used the Allen Trust as his own personal piggy bank for fourteen years.

State prosecutors presented evidence that beginning in the mid 1990s, Harrison “surreptitiously stole trust funds and committed tax evasion.” An agent assigned to the state special crimes unit presented a detailed history of the alleged account abuses in a fourteen page declaration filed in the criminal case.

State investigators eventually accused Harrison of embezzling approximately $421,638.00 from the trust account. Included was $129,987 in trust money diverted by Harrison over a nine year period to a daughter for her rent, vehicle purchase, school supplies, and a down payment on a home. As well as cash totaling $72,039 taken from the trust and deposited directly into Harrison’s personal bank accounts; use of a $72,782 to help purchase lake front property; purchase of a Chevy Tahoe SUV in the amount of $30,255; use of $123,000 to invest in the local airport in his own name; and purchase of $21,375 Savings Bank stock shares in his own name; and payment of personal credit card balances totaling $11,600.

Harrison also spent $49,360 of trust money on attorney fees for the criminal and civil cases stemming from the embezzlement charges.

In a 2007 deposition relating to the civil suit, Harrison said that any money he took from the trust “was money Viola Allen would have given him anyway as he was the son she never had.”

In February 2009, Harrison entered no contest pleas to felonies on three different counts and received a sweetheart sentence in return.

So for:

• Misappropriation of trust assets (Penal Code §§ 487/506);
• Filing willfully false tax returns (Revenue and Taxation Code § 19705(a)(1));
• Admittedly taking in excess of $200,000 (Penal Code § 12022.6(a)(2))

Harrison received a year’s sentence in county jail and three years probation.

That’s not a bad deal for getting caught looting over half a million dollars of a charitable trust fund for fourteen years.

Additional terms of his case include a lifetime ban from serving as trustee of any charitable trust, as well as a lifetime ban from serving as a Director, Officer, or in any fiduciary position that affect money management of assets controlled by any charitable trust or any nonprofit entity. But cheer up, Jim, the terms of your sentencing do not prohibit you from working for Goldman Sachs or any of the other Big Four banks that controls 40% of  market share. So you can always go work for a “too big to fail” national bank and put the screws to the rest of us in the same manner they are.

See, the way it works when you’re a white-collar banking criminal is that when you’re entrusted with over half a rock to set up a trust fund for a scholarship, putting the money into your own pocket instead is OK because you could claim that the clients who appointed you would have just given it to you anyway.

I mean, that’s why they asked you to set up a charitable scholarship fund.  Because really, they wanted you to have all the money, but their mouths weren’t working correctly that day.  Fortunately for your clients, however, you’re part of the  psychic friends network.

Of course, you would make this claim only after the clients were dead. It wouldn’t be a convenient excuse or anything, it would be completely credible because you, the big wheel, elite investment banker, said so.

Fiduciary duty, my ass. There are more substantive penalties for welfare fraud than there are for embezzling money.

Note here that this fact is also why the entire global economy is in a meltdown. So much for “change” we can believe in, eh?

Rock on, Chowdah Ken, you’re just another tool in a long line, and, Caribou Barbie probably has more brain cells than you do, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts just proved that liberal Democrats are the flip side of the same conservative Republican coin.

Meet the new boss, same as the old one.

Douchebags, one and all.

©2010 Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Peyton Farquhar™ and Prattle On, Boyo™ with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Tastes Like Ass

Leaving a stick of butter out of the fridge -even in a cutesy, pretty, overpriced crystal dish- has adverse effects on the butter even if it doesn’t go bad and cause food poisoning when ingested.

Dreadlocks and Steel Piercings

Back in the day when Mtv played music videos, Canadian Jane Child not only had it goin’ on long before with the ‘do that Lady Ga Ga is now sporting, but she was also a hell of a lot more talented and had better tunes.  You go, girl.

2012

Summation

Deadbeat dad.  Hot ex-wife.  Spoiled, over-cutsified children.   Ex-wife’s dorky new boyfriend. Completely and utterly unrealistic dumb luck. Greedy, stupid bureaucrats. Cheesy Russian accents.

Death. Destruction. Earthquakes. Fire. Tsunamis. Arctic cold.  Book of Genesis. Noah’s Ark rehashed.

Opinion

Get it over with:  Take a bottle of pills, wash it down with Jack and slash your wrists.  Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.

By the Numbers

Many Americans felt the exact same way since the movie only grossed $164,105,050 at the box office.  The rest of the world loved it.  Worldwide gross was $600,700,000.

I think they’re trying to tell us something.