I know that the human animal is an excessively flawed one and it seems that every once in a while life has to make me stop and realize such by proving just how flawed I, a human animal, am.
If you have been following these entries (or as I like to think of them, my own personal example of how well one man can brutalize grammar) you know that as I write this I am, in fact, unemployed. Unlike some people that I know I had no qualms about collecting on my unemployment insurance from the EDD. The amount I get from this a month doesn’t even cover my house payment, but it is better then nothing. Many people I know think the exact same way since they have been in put into the same situation I have. Some of these people do contract work as well.
Now, it just so happens that I have the opportunity to do some contract work for a start up company. The amount that I can make with this contract is once again not quite up to the same level that I have become accustomed to in life, but as I said before it is better then nothing. I readily agreed to the price because, although not legal, I could take the contract money and not report it to EDD and could virtually double the money I’m making right now. I’d never admit to doing anything illegal but let’s say that a “friend” of mine might have done this kind of thing in the past. This only works because contractors earnings are reported on the 1099-MISC tax form and that form doesn’t even denote what time period during the year the money was made!
Some things in this world shock the hell out of me, but nothing more then the fact that the government so many of us bash actually sometimes gets smart. It turns out that legislation that went in to effective the first of this year made employers required to report, under certain conditions, the earnings of contractors. This was done to aid the courts in going after dead beat dads and alimony avoiders. At the time I found out about this news I was hitting a considerable low point this week. Upon hearing it I had a melt down because I actually got mad that my state found a way for me not to screw them! Worst of all I would now only be making about the same money I was on EDD and would be taking a big ol’ hit!
I won’t go into the details of what happened next but it would be best to say that I all but talked my way out of the contract work. This, my friends, is by far one of the stupidest things that I have ever done.
The truth of the matter is that I wasn’t going to be making only the same amount of money. Even though you have to report how many hours that you work to EDD, you also report whether you get paid or not. Without going into the laws and the economics it turns out that at most I will only loose a little of my EDD benefits so even if I make money off the contract I still wind up ahead. I was just a stupid blinded human animal.
As the title reads… I’m constantly surprised at how stupid I can be sometimes.
-WW