We have one big four-drawer lateral file cabinet, and two big regular four-drawer file cabinets in our garage, and a two-drawer lateral file in the study, not to speak of the file drawer in the desk. And we are running out of space. The other day I found that last year's tax records, unbalanced from on top of one of the cabinets, had dropped into the cat litter box that is in the garage and the cat had expressed his opinion of them right then and there.
When I told Dennis of this situation, (after I threw away the two front pages of the tax file which were just instructions anyway) he said "We need another file cabinet." No-o-o-o-o! He skirts the edges of the TV show "Hoarders, Buried Alive" by keeping all his papers hidden away in drawers and, for the most part, he knows how to find whatever he is looking for if you give him enough time. But if the garage is too full of file cabinets to get a car in, doesn't that count for the Hoaders thing?
I know you have to keep tax records for seven years in case of an audit, but----I am not making this up!----he has forty-five years of them! He has every tax return we have ever filed and the records to back them up. He knows he doesn't need them; he just wants them. In case.
He has files on every house we have ever owned (seven), files about every car we have ever owned (twenty-two), every insurance claim we have ever made on houses and cars. There are files on all of our medical records going back to the blood tests for our marriage license, every picture of every ball team the boys were ever on even if our boys were out sick the day of the picture, everybody's birth certificates, and on and on and on. There are files about every car accident, files that belonged to his mom who died seventeen years ago, and files related to all his businesses. (He has owned three over the years). And now he has files for Medicare. That can fill a file cabinet all of it's own.
Sometimes these files come in handy. If you have a question about, say, what kind of tires did we purchase for Jake's 1985 Cougar, he can tell you. Or who played third base on the Flyers when they went to that tournament in Midwest City? Important stuff like that. You never know what you might need. Okay, sometimes they have been useful.
When Josh and Jerilyn were booking their honeymoon it included a cruise that went into Canada. At the time you could use birth certificates in lieu of passports to enter Canada. No problem, dig into the file cabinet for Josh's birth certificate. An odd thing happened, though. The legal copy of the birth certificate was not to be found. We did send off to Sacramento to get one but the departure date was getting close and it still had not arrived. Back to the file cabinets. There were several Xerox copies of the certificate but no original. There was, however, a corporate seal from one of the old businesses. This is a device that looks kind of like a big hole-punch but it embosses the name of a company on official documents. You've seen them on legal things.....like birth certificates.
Josh and Jerilyn left on their honeymoon with their birth certificates in hand. Josh, though, did not know that his birth certificate was embossed "Agape Industries" instead of "State of California". We held our breath. It looked like the real thing. It felt like the real thing. You would have to hold it up to the light to tell the difference. No one was going to suspect a clean-cut young, honeymooning, pre-med student of forging documents. They went into Canada. They returned from Canada. They had a lovely trip. It was not until after they were home a few days that we let them in on the secret. We were glad Josh didn't have possession of any scalpels or things like that yet.
I might give in on Dennis getting another file cabinet soon. But I already told him, when he dies, the next vehicle after the hearse is going to be one of those big commercial paper shredding trucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment