I have a floor!

Yes thats right, contrary to popular belief, my bedroom actually does have a floor. I managed to prove its existence tonight after moving aside an old phone bill and an even older coles receipt with a coke purchase on it. There was a theory passed around for a number of generations that a floor had once existed in this place, but had become buried after a serious of uncanny natural disasters. This was largely passed of as a fanciful myth by most people due to its unbelievability. Most people thought that the surface they walked on was comprised of a thick wad of receipts and bank statements with a layer of liquid hot molten bills underneath.

This discovery was purely incidental and quite a coincidence. The date tomorrow is the 31st of October. The last date to lodge my tax return which, of course, I haven’t yet lodged. Now to fill out an Australian tax return you need to know a few things. You basically need to know how much you earned and how much has already been taken out for tax. You also need to know what sort of deductions you can make and how much interest your bank accounts earned. There are a stack of other things you can include too. These important figures are often sent out by the various organizations soon after the end of the financial year. For me these documents quickly enter my highly tuned organizational system that has evolved from many years of having completely no idea, that is they end up in many stacks of paper scattered about my room. So many in fact that I was walking on paper every time I entered my room.

This system of organization is based around one simple idea: deferred processing. This basically means I totally ignore all the pieces of paper I receive (with the exception of my phone bills or insurance or letters from people who aren’t asking for money) until I need them for my tax return. This leads to a big clean up and sorting job of this paper in my room to find all the relevant information I need.

After sorting through the largest offending piles I now have located and collated my bank statements from the November 2004 to now with the exception of February, all my phone bills, my HECS liability statement, my previous and current greenslip and my PAYG statements. One large surprise was finding a Centrelink group certificate that I had completely forgotten about. Now I have all the information (except maybe car related stuff, but that may not be necessary) to complete my tax.

During this sporadic clean up I also managed to throw out a stack of paper about 4 inches tall of rubbish and as a result I can now say that a floor actually does exist in my bedroom.