5:31 PM View

 Annoying afternoon.  So many bad experiences,

First, thinking about the 2024 Canada Trip caused me anxiety.  The bloody thing is going to be expensive and I am scared to look at the air ticket prices.  And I got to do Jenny’s visa application.  Dealing with governments is annoying and soul-destroying.

I learned that Sunday morning, I’d be working — that was actually a morning thing but it made this afternoon bad.

I decided to go to the Jiangyin Tax Bureau for the second time this week. This time was to deal with troubles coming from an app that was supposed to stop you from having to go to the Tax Bureau in the first place.  The app would help you get a tax refund on income tax paid.  But to do this, information had to be entered properly so you could be linked to and recognized by the app.  I couldn’t get linked to the app at school and at home, but was finally able to at the bureau,  But then I learned that I entered my name incorrectly when I registered.  So although I was able to get my tax paid info from the app, I was not linked properly to my bank account, and so the refund money could not be transferred to the account till the problem — my name not being entered in the proper order — was fixed.  I entered my name into the app this way:  Andis Edmunds Kaulins; it should have been entered this way:  Kaulins, Andis Edmunds.  Who knew?  To fix the problem, I will have to go to the Bank branch in an out-of-the-way-now part of Wuxi.

While I was at the tax bureau, my son Tony phoned to ask where I was.  I told him I was at the Tax Bureau to try and get a tax refund; he told me he didn’t have a key to the apartment because I had told him to leave the key there for Mom.  This wouldn’t have been a problem if I hadn’t decided on the spur of the moment to go to the Tax Bureau.  Tony had to wait an hour outside the apartment which made me feel lower than a heel.

BTW, my wife accompanied me to the Tax Bureau.  Because she was in Jiangyin, I made the decision to go.

When it was time to leave the Tax Bureau, we saw that it was raining heavily outside.  Of course, the way this day was going, none of us had umbrellas. We got soaked going to the car.

BTW, I ran into a colleague at the Tax Bureau and he had had a problem with the way he had entered his name in the app.

The drive back to rescue Tony was perilous.  The rain was torrential.  There were puddles a foot deep on some of the roads.  When we got in the area of the school, there was a traffic jam because of all the parents coming to pick up their children.  Talk about your confluence of events!

Finally, I dropped off Jenny so she could rescue Tony.  He was not pleased with me.

I had to drop my colleague at his home.  This took a long time because of long lineups at traffic lights.  The lineup was at a light near the school.  My plan to evade the school traffic didn’t work out: ten minutes to get through the light.  As I dropped off my colleague, he suggested that a take a particular route home that we both thought would avoid traffic: it involved going over ‘the hump’: a two lane road on the other side of the school.  Of course, the way this afternoon was going, there was a lineup at the hump that started at the bottom of one side of the hump and ended on the other.  The cause was that one lane at the bottom was blocked by a bit of road work so that only one car could go through at a time.  Instead of one car letting an oncoming car go through, there was no yielding so that there was a stalled lineup of cars on one side of the construction work till the lead car could gain right of way for his direction.  And it didn’t help that some impatient iceholes would try to jump the queue…

What an afternoon!