I tried. I swear, I really tried. But life defeated me.

So I get this email telling me to check my inbox at Revenue Canada’s website. And immediately I am annoyed, because if they had something to tell me, why not just put that in the email and save some time?

But whatever. I decide today is the day I will deal with it, so I go to the website and try to log in, but I have forgotten my username and password.

I thought I had saved them to my Google Keep page, but nerp.

So I go to do the thing to get my username and passwork back, and it wants to know what I put as my total income on line 150 of my tax return.

And I don’t know these things. I know I should. But I don’t.

Luckily, I still had my Notice of Assessment lying around, so I got the figure off that and put it in. The website then told my my account was locked.

Oh right. That happened two or three years ago. I thought I knew what my username and password were, got it wrong three times, and it locked me out, apparently forever.

It told me that if I wanted my account access back, I had to call up a service rep and talk to them about it.

And that’s where everything stopped for a few years as I have a lot of trouble with the phone and using it to ask for things from strangers, and thus I fell into that particular gumption trap and stayed there for a few years.

This year, though, I really wanted that sweet sweet tax return money, and so I did my taxes online with TurboTax and was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t need to log on to my Revenue Canada account in order to file them any more.

Yay me. I was so happy that I did my 2017 taxes at the same time. In due time, two checks for $75 each showed up and were cashed and saved and spent.

But when the time came for April’s GST rebate check came, I got nothin’. Plus there is the small matter of all the GST checks I missed when I didn’t do my taxes for a while.

So I had been meaning to contact the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) anyhow to see if I could get my greedy paws on THAT money. The email from them was just the impetus for actually getting around to doing it.

Back to the plot : so I am locked out of my account. Bummer. And the CRA website has no way to contact their agents by web or by email (not secure enough I guess), so I had to fill out an online form with my phone number and wait for THEM to call ME.

Beats waiting on hold, I will give them that.

So I get the call and it’s a pleasant sounding fellow named Doug and I tell him about my access problem and thus begins the process of verifying my identity.

He asks for the usual – name, SIN, date of birth – and for that number from line 150 of my tax return, which I was lucky enough to have – but that’s not enough.

He wants to know the amount of my last GST check. Well seeing as that was two years and change ago, I have no frigging idea.

So then he wants my previous address. This is not the sort of information I normally retain. I can show you every place I ever lived – I can take you right to the front door. But the actual address is not stored in my brain.

But I cudgel my brain and come up with 8834 Francis Road, aka Nerdvana, aka the place I lived with Joe, Julian, and Ryan Hawe for like a decade before getting renevicted five or six years ago.

He tells me I am wrong.

I tell him I am sure that’s the right address. I don’t recall our apartment number, but that’s the address all right.

He says no it is not.

So then he wants the figure from line 150 for my 2017 taxes. And I don’t know it. And I don’t keep paper records, so I don’t have it.

I thought I had saved my information as a PDF of my tax return that TurboTax generates as part of their process. But for the life of me, I can’t find it. I went looked for it before I even kicked off this insane process, and could not find it.

At the very lease, there should be ones from many years ago in my backup of my old HD I still have on this computer. But nope. Not that I can find, anyhow.

And it’s not like I would have deleted the files. They take up a trivial amount of space and are, ya know, super important, so why would I?

I had to say goodbye to Doug , the tax rep, and now I am officially stymied. Without information I don’t have, I can’t access my CRA account and find out what the heck they wanted to tell me, let alone get my overdue GST money.

So the CRA are both telling me to check my CRA inbox and not letting me do so because I cannot answer their fucking riddles.

It’s a heck of a catch, that Catch-22.

I have not entirely given up. I have stopped conscious trying to crack the problem because I was getting super stressed out by the whole thing, but I have my subconscious mind grinding away at the problem and I am sure I will figure something out sooner or later.

Oh, one last thing – I felt very clever for thinking to try to find the info on my TurboTax account. After all, that’s where I had inputted it.

But ha ha, no, it won’t tell me that without my logging in to my CRA account either!

God damn it, life, next time use lube.

Hopefully, whatever the hell they wanted to tell me was neither urgent or dire, and so my inability to get their actual message won’t screw me further.

But I want my frigging money, damn it.

And by gosh I am gonna get it.

SO SAYETH THE FOX!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.