The anniversary of your birth, your birthday, date of birth… no matter how you slice it, you annually celebrate another 365 days of existing. For most, birthday celebration memories include cake, streamers, gifts, parties and all the other usual suspects. But for me, as of April 13, 2010, my birthday will always remind me of a particular phone conversation with the IRS. Yes, the Internal Revenue Service.
To fully understand this tale of confusion, lets back track 1991 to my first day of kindergarten where Bruce and Janet Thames were signing up child number 3 in the Illinois public school system. As the youngest of three, you come to expect certain truths to remain constant; you get old clothes, sparse baby book entries, shared rooms, etc. However, you do not expect your parents to forget momentous occasion in your life such as your first steps, first words….the day you were born. Sadly, my parents did just that and while registering for school we realized the day on my birth certificate and the day with which I was registered for school were different. We had celebrated my birthday on the wrong day for 6 YEARS!!!
Flash forward 18 years and the youngest of the Thames family has left the nest and has finally decide to be an adult and file her own taxes. Aided by TurboTax, I filled out my tax formed, click submit and received error message after error message. Forced to call the IRS, I dialed and waited approximately 17 minutes to talk to an actual human being. I gave her all my pertinent information, Date of birth, social security number…all that good tax filing information. Then, I was asked to hold for a supervisor.
A very kind woman came on the phone and explained to me that the Date of Birth I had given her did not match the DOB associated with my social security number. This means that the date on my birth certificate and the birth date on file with my SS Card are different days!!!!!
So here the confusion lies…ages 0-6 we celebrated November 29. Ages 7-23 we celebrated November 28. My mom says 28. My dad says 29. Lake County, IL, says 28. The IRS and US government say 29. My sister says I’m adopted.
Long story short….I DON’T KNOW WHEN I WAS BORN!!!!!!!!!!!
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));try{var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x”);pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push([‘_setAccount’, ‘UA-17776853-2’]);
_gaq.push([‘_trackPageview’]);
(function() {
var ga = document.createElement(‘script’); ga.type = ‘text/javascript’; ga.async = true;
ga.src = (‘https:’ == document.location.protocol ? ‘https://ssl’ : ‘http://www’) + ‘.google-analytics.com/ga.js’;
var s = document.getElementsByTagName(‘script’)[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
})();
