Throwing It All Away

For the last 4 years I’ve signed up for a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) at work.  An FSA let’s you determine an amount of pre tax dollars that you will earmark for medical expenses.  The nice thing about it is that it lowers your taxable income for the year.  The crappy part is if you don’t use the money, you lose it.  For 3 years in a row I set the money aside and then never used it.

This year, however, I spent every last dime.  I just spent the last hour ordering 4 boxes of contact lenses AND perusing www.drugstore.com.

Can’t wait to get my Advil, Midol, band aids, blemish sticks, Pepto, etc. in the mail.  Man, I might even use that shit as stocking stuffers.  I’m sure my sister and brother-in-law could use an extra bottle of Advil after having to deal with Damien and Lucy(fer) all day.  I could even give them some Benadryl so they could drug the kids and get them to calm the hell down.

FSA, I love you.  You complete me.

Claude’s Many Adventures: Party Style

When he’s not spending time in “meetings” (with strange fellows in Macy’s restrooms), he’s working. For the past few years Claude has worked at a non-profit agency in DC. Yesterday was the big party held by his organization. What was supposed to be an easy party, turned into a full-fledged nightmare.

He had disappeared from email from 2 days, so I harassed him until he spilled every single bean:

Well the day started with us finding out that the person volunteering to play Santa couldn’t do it. So we had no Santa and no Santa suit. So I got to resolve all of that before lunch. Then I got to drive from our office in for 45 minutes to pick up a rental Santa suit and then back to Van get my boss and all the supplies we needed for the event, only to drive over to the venue.

So we get to the school where the event was held and none of the tables and chairs we rented had been delivered yet. Over 50 tables and 500 chairs that we needed to have set-up by 6 PM. Its now 4 PM. Also, we asked the school if it was possible to show a DVD during the program and they said yes. Well, the school decided that what we actually wanted to do was show a power-point, so that’s all they had set-up. We had to quickly figure that out, which involved getting a coworker’s laptop from her apartment and the VP bringing in her stereo from home so that we could play the sound on the movie. Then the furniture finally showed up at 4:45 and the delivery guys were refusing to deliver it because they had to walk up a flight of stairs. While all of that was happening, the VP of the school casually let me know that when all of the drinks for our event were delivered to the school earlier that day, the school turned them away because they thought someone fraudulently ordered them on their account. So we now have no drinks for an event where we are serving dinner for approx 500 people. Fucking awesome! So we had to go into the school cafeteria and take all of their juice boxes for the kids to give out to the families. Claude, at that point I just started laughing, to keep from crying. It was awesome!