April 27, 2012

I have given up on the 'cute' titles for my post - they make sense when I start but.... Oddly enough, the whole reason I started my blog never actually happened; as far as I can tell, no kidney stone (yay!). Work is a bitch - I have been on ID theft since the second week in January. The plan during the first week of Jan was that ID theft was such a 'harsh' duty, they would spread it out - instead of having a week of id theft each month, more people would be put on call and each person would only have id theft 1 day a week. That changed real fast; it is believed that there have been more than a half a million cases of ID theft this year alone. Compare that to approximately 400,000 cases from 2009 to 2011.

It is pretty intense having to help people through a pretty harrowing experience while keeping an eye on the clock - the tax payers tell me they waited almost an hour to get through; many hang up out of frustration. Worse yet, they put the phone down for a moment and I take the call and I have to disconnect if no one answers within a certain time frame. Once I walk them through getting their return filed and telling who else to contact to protect themselves, then I have to tell them it will be 90-120 days before the ID theft team contacts them - even worse, that is only informing the taxpayer that we have verified their identity - there is no time frame for the actual processing of the return which does not start until we verify the TP's id. There are people right now who are just getting their 2010 tax refunds.

Today, Friday my manager came by at 4:00 to tell us we can get off the id theft line for the rest of the day - I turn off my phone at 4:20 so "yippee!" I got 20 minutes of helping people pay their past due tax bill. I do what I can to help; I try to keep up-beat. I think that being a seasonal worker will keep me sane; my tour of duty ends June 15 - they can extend it but they have to furlough me for at least 14 day by the end of June to keep me in seasonal. They can call me back after that. Last year, I was called back for 6 weeks early September, then again at the beginning of December. Boom, it was January and my ToD began; they up-skilled me to ID theft during the first week and suddenly, here I am.

Thanks for letting me rant.