Discretion being the better part of valor (not to mention hubris and arrogance and snooty self-importance), you’d think a person as humble as I am (he said, humbly) wouldn’t have to be reined in by circumstance. But I might have picked a fight with the U.S. government today, if I hadn’t run into a bit of good luck. Discretion imposed is better than no discretion at all.

The Social Security Administration had the nerve to tell me I hadn’t filed W-2 forms for the kennel employees — for 2004!. Not only did I know I’d done it, I knew I had copies of the forms to prove it. All I had to do was find them. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to throw them in the government’s face (assuming it has one) and wave them in front of the government’s eyes. Tell me I didn’t do my job. Ha!

Only I couldn’t find the forms. I looked everywhere I could think of that I might have filed them, including all the wrong places. (Well, all the places I looked were wrong places, right up until I found them.)

I felt so vindicated. I had the nasty letter composed in my head, until I looked at the forms I was about to send to the government. I had used the wrong employer identification number on them. No wonder the government couldn’t find a record of my filing them. I quickly revised the letter down to a brief apology, with explanation. Luckily, I discovered the error before I woke up the sleeping tiger. Nobody wants the folks in Washington snarling at them with claws out and fangs bared.

To be fair to myself, it really was the IRS’s fault that I’d filed the forms wrong in the first place, over a year ago. They had originally issued us one ID number, and then replaced it with another, after I’d filed several tax forms. It took nearly a year of hard work (mostly on the part of Julie, who has much more patience than I have) to get the IRS to transfer records from one number to the other. They had simply neglected to tell the Social Security people about their error. But let’s not let the IRS know that I blame them.