This annual season of self-examination

and reflection ­ and I mean tax time, not Lent ­ is hard enough

to negotiate without the irregularity of standardization in forms and

receipts.

Dave does our taxes himself,

with a little help from software designed to make it easy (yeah, right),

and all he asks of me is to document my earnings and the business expenses

I claim. The earning part is easy, thanks to the timely arrival of a 1099

from the newspaper, as well as stubs of paychecks, big, clear and easy

to sort.

The business expenses are not

so easy. My search requires rummaging through a basket of sometimes wrinkled

and fading receipts to match them up with my computer's allegations, to

separate business expenses from household.

I'd like to ask the register-and-credit-card-receipts

deities one simple question: Why can't these important scraps of paper

be designed with some consistency in the arrangement of critical clues

such as the date?

Take this handful of locally

generated receipts. These from the post office are printed bright and

clear at the top-left edge. That seems to me the logical place, since

I date letters there. Kroger's is black-on-white, easy to see and fairly

easy to find, right after the information that my cashier was Misty.

Staples puts the date near

the top, but hides it among other numbers: 1035 06/13/01 12:47. Cost Plus

writes it out ­ June 18, 2001 ­ but on the very last line of

the tape. Thought I never would find the date on Pike Nursery's very faintly

printed receipt. Fourth line from the bottom, and camouflaged: Register:

REG5 Jun 20 2001 2:39 PM.

Sears's is near the center

of the slip. Wal-Mart's is clear, but at the bottom, beneath a line enjoining

me to cash my tax rebate check here. Are they trying to be funny?

And this one from Omega Books

­ a third of the way down a slip printed all in caps, and with lots

of colons and a diagonal slash through the numeral 0. To these fading

eyes the receipt appears to be dated : 86/13/81.

Kmart may be the worst of all.

I pulled several to compare them. They are printed very light on off-white

paper, and the date is almost at the bottom. The strangest thing

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