{"id":17,"date":"2006-09-09T21:51:53","date_gmt":"2006-09-09T21:51:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/?p=15"},"modified":"2017-02-20T08:08:16","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T08:08:16","slug":"friday-december-28-2001-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/09\/friday-december-28-2001-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday, December 28, 2001"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font face=\"arial, sans-serif\">           I want the fat guy in the cheap suit back.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"arial, sans-serif\">I used to do our taxes by hand, working from handwritten ledgers and boxes of receipts. Then eventually I started using a spreadsheet &#8212; PC-Calc, to be exact &#8212; to keep track of stuff. Finally, early in 1997 I broke down and got tax software, specifically Parsons Personal Tax Edge, for the 1996 tax year.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"arial, sans-serif\">I liked it a lot, to my surprise, and one of its charms, as far as I was concerned, was that it included video of a &#8220;tax accountant&#8221; who went through the whole &#8220;interview,&#8221; collecting the information you typed in and inserting it into the forms. The tax accountant was a fat guy in a cheap suit who darn well LOOKED like a tax accountant.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"arial, sans-serif\">I liked him. I found him reassuring. And his script was well-written, being clear, informal, and informative. I advance-ordered PTE for &#8217;97.<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"arial, sans-serif\">And then Parsons sold out to Intuit, and I got TurboTax instead of PTE. I&#8217;ve been using TurboTax ever since, and it&#8217;s a pretty good program&#8230;<\/font><\/p>\n<p><font face=\"arial, sans-serif\">But I miss the fat guy in the cheap suit.  The tax experts in the TurboTax video don&#8217;t have anything like his low-budget charm.<br \/>\n<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I want the fat guy in the cheap suit back. I used to do our taxes by hand, working from handwritten ledgers and boxes of receipts. Then eventually I started using a spreadsheet &#8212; PC-Calc, to be exact &#8212; to keep track of stuff. Finally, early in 1997 I broke down and got tax software,&hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2006\/09\/09\/friday-december-28-2001-2\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-strange-days"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}