the crazy stops here…every fifteen minutes

Who chooses a scenic highway with a top speed limit of forty-five miles an hour over the interstate? This girl. I drove the Blue Ridge Parkway to Lynchburg, Virginia this weekend. I could have taken I-40 or I-26 to I-81 and made it in four hours, but I didn’t.

The Parkway is one of my favorite places in the world. So simple, so beautiful- in a world of double-tandem semi-trucks and seventy miles per hour speed limits, the Parkway is a haven, a refuge. My parents don’t call me their “little ridge-runner” for no reason.

I regretted my route once; when I found myself behind a car with Iowa plates on a steep decent with more than a few descending decreasing radius curves- a fancy engineering term for a bitch of a curve. A descending radius curve is where the road changes elevation in the curve- you’re not just turning, you’re also going downhill. A decreasing radius curve is where the turn gets harder as you go through it.  So, of course, a declining decreasing radius curve is one that combines a drop in elevation with a tightening of the curve once you’re in it.

What makes these curves so treacherous? The grade of the decent causes your car to accelerate, which makes you want to hit your brakes to slow back down, but that makes it almost impossible to steer into the apex of the curve. You pick up speed when it is the last thing you need.

After you’ve driven in the mountains for awhile, you get the hang of these nasty little curves. You learn to start into them slower than you would a level turn. The car sets itself a line as you start the curve and pick up speed, and your job is to interfere as little as possible with that natural line, steering only as much as necessary, and only braking very lightly just before the apex if absolutely necessary.

People from Iowa are perhaps not familiar with this technique. So they fight the line. They ride their brakes or hit their brakes hard in the apex, which makes steering much harder. I feel for them- they’re scared, they’re getting a lesson in vehicle physics that isn’t had in Iowa, they are white-knuckled and full of fear. (Not to mention that they’re melting their brake pads and running the risk of losing braking power altogether). It’s frustrating and irritating for me to ride behind them; they ruin my line when they fight their own, but I’m irritated while they are scared for their lives.

I wish I could tell them not to fight the line. To slow down a little more coming in, if they’re nervous, but once the curve starts, take your foot off the pedals and just steer. Fighting the line is actually more dangerous.

I’ve been stressed, scared, frustrated, angry and unsure of myself. The life I dream of is on the horizon, and the life I once cherished is ending slowly but surely, like the passing of mileposts. I cannot see what the road looks like from where I’m at to where I’m surely headed, and that element of uncertainty is what makes me crazy. I drive myself crazy trying to plan and plot and scheme and prepare for every possible outcome or pitfall or obstacle, drafting plans A through ZZ in a attempt to find some security in life-changing situations that are well beyond my control.

I’ve been fighting the line. I’ve been braking and freaking out and over-steering like a flatlander. I’m making things much, much harder than they have to be, and more dangerous too, in the sense that my health and emotional stability have suffered, are suffering, and that means that I’m not bringing my best self to anything I’m involved in.

Time to take my foot off the brake, loosen my grip on the wheel and trust the road.

“Feel the wind
And set yourself the bolder course
Keep your heart
As open as a shrine
You’ll sail the perfect line..”

-bob seger “in your time”

The Issue: Our buyer in the Asheville office is ordering supplies that are exempt from sales tax because they are used to create a product sold for resale. In order not to pay tax we don’t owe, we need to provide the supplier with a North Carolina certificate of exemption for resale.

Small Business Resolution: The invoice comes into the payables clerk, who matches it to the packing slip and purchase order, identifies it as an inventory purchase and enters the invoice in the accounting system to be paid without the sales tax. When she cuts the check, she encloses a copy of the certificate. The supplier reverses the sales tax charge and marks our account or the particular items as exempt for future orders.

The Corporate Resolution: The invoice comes to the payables clerk in Mexico, who matches it using the three way system described above. She doesn’t pay the sales tax, but she doesn’t provide an exempt certificate. The supplier gets a short check and calls the buyer to resolve the situation. The buyer doesn’t have an exemption certificate, so she asks the Accounting Manager (yours truly) for a copy of it. Except I don’t have it either, because I don’t really run the department. I only do the month and year end closing and reconcile balance sheet accounts. So I ask the senior accountants in Chicago (who I’ve worked with on sales tax issues before) for the certificate or who else to ask. They respond that they don’t have it either, and forward my request to the payables clerk. She responds that she doesn’t have it, that it is the buyer’s responsibility to provide it to the supplier.

I point out the futility of this exercise, but by this time, we’re in the midst of the month-end closing, so we’re all too busy meeting deadlines to fix it.

By this time, my manager the controller gets involved. He asks me for the information I have about the issue, and I forward the emails to a coworker in our Arizona office so she can put everything together for him. He schedules a conference call. The tax department is involved and aware of the issue now, but they refuse to provide the certificate until my manager identifies the items that we’re purchasing. My manager forwards this request to me, but again, I don’t have that information. So, I request it from the buyer who asked me for the certificate.

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I don’t know how this little fairy tale ends yet. I only know that since we got swallowed by the Borg, it now takes at least seven people, a dozen emails, one conference call and three months to send a sales tax exemption certificate.

Maybe that’s why they offer such stellar mental health coverage…