Why tax forms are among my worst nightmares

I've always struggled with maths, much to the superficial irony of my high school mates who used to remark, "But your dad's a maths tutor," to which I'd reply, "And your dad's in prison. Shouldn't you be robbing a bank?"

Sure, I could grasp the concepts and reasoning behind all those formulas, but I found it difficult to apply them to questions where the working hadn't already been done for me, regardless of practice. Even worse, I had a knack for making stupid mistakes: typing the wrong number into my calculator or pressing multiply instead of divide, and then failing to realise that the resulting answer was so horribly inaccurate.

Yet, when the test or what have you came back marked, I'd see where I'd gone wrong and immediately realise how stupid I was. In short, I knew how to get it right, but couldn't. I had good days, of course, where I'd get lucky and make next to no mistakes. But these moments were few and far between.

It was a horrid past, I agree; but it was not I who uncovered it. No, it was the tyrannous, ever-conspiring government! Evidently they like to laugh at the mathematically challenged by over-complicating tax return forms. I'm self-employed, so I had to declare my own tax. There was no opting out.

Older and wiser, I naturally assumed the process would be easy. My thoughts went something like, "It's designed for everyone to handle; and I'm not entirely stupid, so this'll be a breeze!" I was mainly replaying that thought to suppress the fact that tax-return-filling-out had to be the most boring thing anyone could ever do ever (this fact alone led to hundreds of 'I'll do it tomorrow' days, until I received a warm letter in the mail saying it was overdue).

Preferring not to pay a fine, I retrieved the forms and slumped them onto my desk. And boy did they slump. There had to be at least four double-spaced pages in there. Four! And the front page was devious, too. It made the process look easy with its 'Enter name here' and 'Enter IRD number here' instructions. Don't get me wrong; I do know my name. But it was what followed that reminded me exactly why I failed Year 11 Accounting.

From page two I was stricken with the inevitable headache of frustration and confusion. Frustration because I had to make multiple calls to IRD since, as it so happens, I had three jobs during that tax year; and confusion because I had no idea what 'residual income' meant, or why I had to keep copying box 2 to box 12 to box 17 to box 24. You see, writing the same sum a million times (when really it should've only been once) made the process feel, in contrast, too simple. Surely I was doing something wrong, right?

And then it asked me to add box 5 and 10 and 12; and I ended up with so many added-together numbers that I forgot which came from where, and thus what meant what. It didn't help that most of the tax jargon didn't make any sense to me.

Three hours, I tell you, and a handful of Panadol. That's what it took to get it done. Even with the aid of my dad, I still got confused.

In the end, like any good achievement, I made a copy of it for future reference. I don't want to have to go through that process ever again.