In Honor of Martin Luther King

No coffee yet--it's a crime--the sound of the coffee maker gurgling in the background as my pacificatory music. You have to love the folks at Intuit--at least you do if you're an Intuit stockholder. I am not an Intuit stockholder, nor am I in-tu-it, nor do I find anything intuiitive about their products. And sometimes--take yesterday, for example--they are downright annoying!

It's time to file my annual sales tax reports for Georgia and Illinois. It's not almost time, or they're coming up soon, or anything less dire. No. It's time. They are due the 20th of the month following the end of the reporting period (2007) or the first day that's not a postal holiday, if the 20th falls on a postal holiday. We have many things for which to be grateful to Martin Luther King. I, quite unfacetiously, am grateful to him today for one more day to get my accounting done.

Yesterday I discovered that I had never installed Quickbooks on the laptop. Kind of hard to do your accounting these days with no accounting software. I dutifully found the cd, dusted it off and went to install. During the marvelous installation process I am given no options for which components I wish to install. (Oh and by the way, I am installing Quickbooks 2005 for Windows on the Parallels Windows installation on my Mac. I am forced, due to the reported bugginess of Quickbooks for Mac, to use my old Quickbooks for Windows. I hate Windows.)

Usually if a software application has other third-party pieces bundled with it, it gives you the chance of installing, say, Internet Explorer 5, or Flash Player 7, or whatever. Not Quickbooks 2005. It tells you it's installing them, then it fails to install Flash Player 7 and quits. I dutifully try to manually install Flash Player 7 to get QB past its hump, but it's no longer available--support has been discontinued by Adobe (another favorite company...) and you have to install FP 9. No biggie, I think, QB just needs to see an instance of FP to continue the install... Let's ALL roll on the floor and laugh now.

Fortunately the Internet is a mysterious and powerful device whose mystery is only exceeded by its power and I find a posting on some troubleshooting forum that points me to an old support article at Intuit, which in turn points me to a file on my cd that will install just the QB application and not all the other nonsense. I'm saved! Not so fast...

Sadly there was one more piece of windows software necessary to complete the QB install--the .Net framework. I went to install it manually (from a download on the Microsoft site) and find out I need to download and install the Microsoft installer application in order to install the .Net framework, in order to install QB 2005. Gusty sigh. Oh hey, did I mention that in order to download the free installer application from Microsoft you have to first download an application from them that will check to make sure you're running an authentic copy of Windows. If you're not, nyah, nyah nuh boo boo. So I download and install the authentication software. I'm genuine (whew!). I download and install the installer app. I download and install the .Net framework. I FINALLY install QB 2005 and restore my data file to it. Then exhausted, I go drink heavily. (Actually I go eat steak and golden potatoes prepared by my wonderful spouse and drink Turley wine.)

Today I will finally enter all the data form 2007 into Quickbooks so I can file and pay my annual sales tax. (She swallowed the cow to catch the dog, she swallowed the dog to catch the cat, she swallowed the cat to catch the bird, she swallowed the bird to catch the spider, she swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll die.)

Thank you Martin Luther King.