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Monday, June 20, 2011

Do you actually want my money?


The tedious saga of my attempting to pay my taxes goes on and on.

With the particular help of a battle weary colleague I have attempted to submit my tax declaration on line.  The form is 50 pages long and is virtually impossible to fill out without making errors.  Helpfully (and yes I am using that word with deep irony) a little table appears every time you try to submit it telling you which sections are incorrect.

After two days of work the 50 pages; hours on the computer and a last desperate printing out of the material in a vain attempt to pay on line I am just about to give up.  Except I do not have that option either.

As everything is printed out I could take the material to the bank: if I could get to the bank.  But the banks have now switched to their “summer hours” which means that no one in work can get to them.  Similarly with the offices of the tax people – they are not open when I can get to them.  Impasse.  Or at least Catch-22.

Which has just been smashed by my being allowed out of school to go to my bank and pay the bloody thing over the counter.

As is usual, the person directly in front of me seemed to be putting in the tax returns for Shell/BP/ICI and took the time commensurate with dealing with the affairs of such a conglomeration!

By the time it was my turn to be served and I had un-gritted my teeth I was beginning to wonder if I had time to call into the house for the cup of tea that I had been looking forward to since I left school on my mission of mercy to pay my tax.  I was seen to mercifully quickly with the 50 pages of print out neatly divided into a section to be sent to the Hacienda, a section neatly stamped and typed on given back to me and a third section retained by the bank.  All of this information has been dealt with electronically, but there is still a paper trail to make assurance double sure!  Pointless and witless!  Still, I can now relax about the state being in a condition to carry on, now that it has my €40.02 safely in its grip.

The amount of time, effort, petrol and soul that has been put into paying this amount is out of all proportion to its size – but at least the whole process is over for another year.  I trust!

Our school fun run, or misery walk as it was for some, has now been completed and the phalanxes of police who guarded the route through the repugnantly opulent area in which we teach have gone back to their bars.

Although I shouldn’t say that as we did see the boys in blue (or whatever they wear here) do something else last Friday night: for the first time in my life I was breathalysed!

This was because there was a routine roadblock set up at one of the bridge entrances to the beach part of Castelldefels and all cars were being stopped. 

I used to encounter these barriers after I had been to the opera and was returning to Castelldefels late at night or early in the morning, but all of the times that the police had set these up I was waved through as obviously not looking like the target victim for this tired police sting!

This time I was stopped.  Why, I don’t really know as I was still in school dress and ostentatiously wearing a tie.  Indeed one of the other policemen saw me and then asked his colleague why he had stopped me.  Toni said that he told his superior that I had looked nervous!

Anyway after showing my licence and weathering a barrage of Spanish an English-speaking officer was found who guided me through the rest of the procedure.

I was handed a sealed plastic pocket which held the mouthpiece for the test.  The one thing I was determined to do was make it unnecessary for the policeman to tell me to “keep blowing” which is such a fixed feature on all the television reports which feature hapless drivers in the clutches of smirking policemen.

I am glad to report that my breath was not half exhausted before the ping of the machine indicated that the test was over.

It was duly taken away and after a few seconds I was told that the test was negative and we went on our way, so that the real drunks could be caught later – probably going in a different direction and at a rather later time in the night!

These roadblocks only occur at the weekends in our part of the town and, as we are working up to the summer and a national holiday just before the schools throw out their pupils for the holidays we can expect more of them.

Parking is also reaching new levels of stupidity with last weekend being particularly notable for the sheer lack of consideration which seemed to have motivated most of the drivers who failed to find a legal parking space.

Near the beach nothing is sacred for the determined parker: zebra crossings, pavements, corners, driveways, entrances, exits – wherever you can get a car, there, in high season, you will find a vehicle. 

One which was parked in front of a locked driveway opposite us had its windscreen wipers wrenched out by the end of the afternoon.  I felt it difficult to sympathise.  Though the perpetrators must have been glaringly obvious to the car owner.

I don’t quite know how it has happened but I have done far more than my fair share of supervision today and ended up with a second year class which has a few prize idiots in it.  But, when all is said and done we are in the Last Days – at least with the pupils: three more days left in this week and then a four day week of half days and then . . .

Almost there!


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