Thursday, November 18, 2010

Deflation of the Documentation Dictator, or I Love Alliteration

Sept. 3rd, 2010

Yesterday we went to the bank. I'm sure if I had shown up in jeans and a t-shirt I would have been fine, but I tarted it up a little, sported a dress and heels and came well armed with my giant folder, notebook, pen and all the necessary forms... so I thought. 
   There is nothing so embarrassing to someone who is compulsively organized than to find they are missing a key piece of documentation. Stephen skipped out to meet up, greeting us like old friends and making sure we had coffee before we met in his office. He was impressed that we had filled out all our forms, had our Articles of Organization, and our Business License all signed and ready to go. Erin (I have so named my partner I'm tired of saying partner, so this is what she gets) and I gossiped, probably inappropriately, while Stephen pecked away at his computer transferring information. We supplied random secret questions, to be answered by us for identification purposes, and photo IDs, credit cards and other bits of data used to separate us from the terrorists laundering money. 
    "Umm the Employer Identification Number, should be nine digits, you only have eight here, do you have a different number?" I opened my giant 3" 3 ring binder with confidence and flipped to the Oregon Department of Revenue letter. Nope wrong number we need the Federal EIN. Crap! I know I have it, I remember doing it, I blogged about for craps sake I have to have it somewhere.  I actually became flushed with embarrassment that I couldn't find the number. Grabbing the phone I called my husband, who was out walking the dog, and begged him to call me when he got home and read me the little numbers on the two Post-it notes on my desk. He called back and neither of the numbers was at all useful. Double crap crap. 
     Thankfully I knew that our new bank provided free internet computers in the lobby (see blog about tour). I went and accessed ALL of my accounts, knowing that certainly I had a copy of the email from the IRS in a file. I am a documentation dictator after all and save everything. 
     Nothing, absolutely nothing.  Feeling like even more of an ass, I got on the IRS website to see if I could "log-in" and retrieve my information. No chance, you have to call them. So I sucked it up and called the IRS. Gee what a fun time this is. 
     "Your wait time is 10-13 minutes", repeated every few minutes with the same four bar phrase of piano musak that must be used to sedate the listener so they receive less angry patrons calling. I kept Erin and Stephen waiting for the full 13 minutes while I retrieved the number I purposefully got in order to open a bank account.  When I was finally put through to a person who read me off her identification number for satisfaction reporting purposes, I was put on hold again while she evidentially looked my my business in an antiquated card catalog system. It took so long I was embarrassed all over again that I may not have gotten an EIN from the federal government and she was going to tell me she had nothing on record.
   They did have it and she was very pleasant with handing me over the information I had desperately been waiting for. Everything else went off without a hitch. Stephen re-filled out the paperwork since his session had timed out, thanks to me, and we signed our papers and got another neat folder from the bank. We handed over our first deposit, a whole one hundred dollars, and got our first deposit slip that I am considering framing. 
    Nearly two hours later we left the bank. All we need to do now, is order checks to write with the money that will hopefully materialize in our account. Meanwhile we have started the marketing section of our business plan, every step you start has ten sub-steps to follow, so the end of the tunnel literally gets further away the further you proceed. I'm hoping to knuckle down and do some work this weekend, at the very least go backward a step and start some of the costing projects we need to have. 
    We have an opportunity to buy equipment that we need from a company that's downsizing, things that would be more than perfect and at a bargin rate. Somehow we need to find some capital faster than we had intended. I'll keep you up to date on that process.

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