I may be good, but that’s a bit rich

Well, isn’t this just a wonderful time of the year? Bushfires, floods, cyclones, the bloody cricket (I for one, see nothing wrong with bowling underarm along the ground to the Kiwis — it seems only proper to bowl a ball at their knuckles), and $25 from the NAB for missing last month’s Bankcard payment. This seems fair, could the little darlings possibly survive on 16 per cent interest?

And what about back-to-school expenses? How can shoes move from viable, wearable foot protectors to fossilised relics, steeped in the fashion of the late 1700s — apparently, in the space of five weeks?

But the real doozey was the discreet OHMS letter that lobbed up during the week. I always wondered what OHMS stood for. Opening Hours Monday to Saturday? Over Here Mister Sucker? I finally worked out it stands for — Only Heaps More S#%@.

Anyway, this letter announced with some delight that I owed Centrelink the sum of $231,802 because I have kids. Say what?

I’ve done some basic calculations here (who says a university education is worthless, I now know what the square root symbol does — it converts your gross salary into after tax income. Try it, it works). I figured out that to owe Centrelink this much, I must have 225 kids under the age of 18.

Heh heh, 225 kids? Now there’s virility you don’t get from dudes with a full head of hair. Testosteronites Unite! Death to Full Follicites!

Forget those boring little cults where you only end up with three or four wives, I figured that in order to end up with 225 little tackers, I must have been busy. Very busy.

Apparently I have a harem of 11 wives, all in a state of perpetual pregnancy.

Or perhaps someone has been secretly mining my private parts as I slept. You know, kind of like one of those Nigerian pipeline rip offs, it’s just that things didn’t quite blow up in my case, but apparently packing the same ‘bang’ as a cup full of unleaded petrol, sorry — super. Nothing unleaded here.

Anyway, closer inspection of the dreaded letter also revealed that Amanda Vanstone, sadly not one of the 11, had decided to let me off $100,000.

Now you got to hand it to Amanda, how generous is that? We haven’t seen such generosity since the Government gave everyone a free Tacks pack. I know it was spelt differently but, let’s face it, it was designed to nail you.

One-hundred gorillas from the boys in Treasury. Any chance of the ATO doing something similar? Hell, I’d even let them keep it if they put it towards one or two redundancies.

I read on to discover that it was all because we had received a tax benefit.

At this stage, it suddenly dawned on me that the letter was a joke letter, sent by some sick colleague who had discovered how to forge things on his new computer — must find out if he can do $50 notes.

Tax benefit ? Yeah sure. Next they’ll be telling me that smoking is good for me too.

Deciding to play along, I rang the 1300 enquiry number on the letter. Sure enough, it’s answered by a voice that tells me it is Centrelink, ‘spea-king-in-one-syl-a-ble-at-a-time’. I realised that it was no joke after waiting longer than a call to my bank.

There was a very pleasant chappy who explained that I had underestimated my earnings in 1873 and that following something called an ATO Data Match, I was, basically, buggered. It would seem that the Data Match starts an information fusing process which explodes any thoughts you might have about getting away with something.

Basically, if I didn’t pay up the overpayment, less Amanda’s Christmas present, they would send some guys around who would, to put it in the crudest possible way, have my balls.

Now, with 225 kids so far, this seemed a reasonable alternative and I asked whether or not they could make it later that morning?

The chappy explained that no, it would take at least 28 days. Doing some quick mental arithmetic, I figured I would father another two kids over that period of time and decided to use alternative methods.

Happy chappy then told me I could repay the amount through the post office or BPay it. Rolling up at the post office with $100,000 in cash seemed a little strange, as most stories involving the post office and $100,000 require the person to wear a balaclava. I decided I would go for the BPay option and asked how I could pay Centrelink.

I then received instructions which involved me pushing enough buttons on my phone to set up a conference call with all 11 wives, no matter where they are in the world. It was at this point that the chappy became my best buddy.

“It’ll be $1,318.02” he said.

What the ..…? It seems the Centrelink laser printer may have had a slight problem with the decimal point.

Well, let me tell you, with some relish, I said goodbye to happy chappy and immediately set up a BPay to Centrelink.

I’m not sure what’s happened though. It seems I may have booked seven people on the North Pole Explorer tour with Uzbekistan Adventure Holidays, all booked up to Peter Reith’s old phone card.