We Are All South Carolinians Now

So I'm sitting at my computer trying to do a little work this morning. Normal morning, normal work, nothing special today. As I'm tooling through my day, I notice The Misses has sent me an e-mail. Then another...then another...then, you get it. Here's the thing about The Misses and her work day e-mail's, she sends them in batch. Her job keeps her busy. She manages to squeeze some personal time to do a little family management, and sends e-mails out in batch. But she also likes replies in batch. This allows her to feel like I'm on top of whatever just landed on my lap and she can get back to her real work of saving lives while I'm mired in Kling-Family minutia.

Today's Honey-Do e-mail, contained something Monty Python would consider "completely different". A seemingly random e-mail was forwarded from Amazon.com in order to let me know I may owe some state taxes to South Carolina. Huh? Did we live in SC sometime last year? Do we live there now? Did we visit the Palmetto State? Did we even set a toe in the lesser Caroline? No to all the above. So what it this all about? Time to do some Interweb research.

Home of the Catfish Stomp is also home to zany internet taxes. Sitting around the South Carolina state capitol building, smoking North Carolina tobacco cigars and sipping Kentucky whiskey, the legislature has discovered interweb shopping is bleeding the state dry. By golly something needs to be done. We can't have people who don't live in our state, or make things in our state, go around giving things to people in our state without good South Carolinians getting a piece of the action. Yep that's right. Apparently if you buy something in another state and use it in SC (or in my case give it as a gift), you owe SC some tax money. They call it a South Carolina Use Tax. There you go.

It took about thirty minutes of my life to get someone on the phone to explain this to me. Surely they don't mean to levee this tax on non-residents. Yep the do, Brian you need to pay us some taxes. Next I needed to create an account on the SC tax assessors web site. This took forever; they wanted the regular user ID and password (with 2 numbers?), then they wanted four security questions, then they wanted my SSN and birth name, then they wanted to know where and when I was born, then they wanted my current address, then they wanted the address that the product would be used, then they wanted to know the month of the purchase (why?), then they wanted the a picture of my mother's-mother's garter belt...what that one was a different site, skip it. You get the idea. It took a long time to actually get to the what-do-I-owe part of this process. Finally I get to the place where I can calculate taxes. One dollar, eighty-nine cents.

That's it? A buck eighty-nine? All this for less than two dollars? It reminded me of the kid from Better Off Dead, "Two dollars".

Sorry to all my friends in SC, you will never get another present from me. If you want me to continue to celebrate Christmas or birthday's, or Bar Mitzvah you need to get a post office box or a shipping address in Georgia.