October 15th is the big deadline of the year in the pension business, like April 15th to accountants. October 15th is the day the extensions run out on the pension tax forms. Not long ago, my company had 400 still to do, with time running out. People were putting in weekends and long evenings on the job, unpaid. They still are.

I hate last minute pressure. I resent that so many people delayed sending in their information so long, putting us in a position of having to give up our weekends. They've had all year to tell us how much money is in their pension plans and give us a list of all the employees in 2007 with their salaries. I understand procrastination, so I hit the panic button two months before the deadline, and lit a fire under them. Most came through. Since I hit the panic button on my clients much earlier than all the other employees did, I don't have as many last minute Charlies and I don't have to give up my weekends to get them done.

I know a few women on the job who still have 30 or 40 to do. There's really only 2 weeks to get them done. October 15th isn't that far away. They'll have to do 2 or 3 a day. Good trick. This can be really complicated sometimes, depending. Some of these take a week to get done.

I'm down to 9. Friday morning I did the route again, contacting procrastinators, pressing for them to get me the info I need. I led off by saying that they will be fined thousands of dollars by the government when the deadline isn't met. That's an attention getter. I got instant responses from most of the 9, including 3 of them who sent in their info Friday right after getting shook up by me. I didn't have time to look at any of it though. I'm doing something else, some big nightmare project. Hopefully Monday I'll get to look at those 3 at least.

On Friday, my goal was to take care of the nightmare project as much as possible, but I kept getting interrupted by half a dozen or more phone calls, each one demanding my time. And I gave it to them. I let myself be distracted, and I took care of all the callers. I like to just give people whatever they want or need, and keep them happy. Others in my office were saying they aren't doing that, they're just telling all their callers that they are on another project right now and they'll get to them after it's done.

I don't like having voicemail messages on my phone. I don't like unfinished business. I want everyone fully satisfied, cheerful, right away, and I don't want any voicemail messages at all. Dispose of it, erase it.

This one guy, a dentist, has been waiting nearly the whole year to terminate his pension plan, and it has been sitting in my In Box the whole year unattended because I didn't have time for it. A few months ago he called me on it, and I looked into it and found that he owed us money, and I went over it with him. Last week I finally had time to look things over, and I found that the guy never actually let us know what he wants us to do. He never made the choice, the Column A vs. Column B choice. That's pretty awkward, since his stuff has been kicking around the better part of a year ignored.

I also found out that even though he thinks he paid for everything, he didn't. So I'm in the position of telling him that for one thing I haven't done a shitting thing for him, point number two is I still don't know what the hell he wants me to do, and point number three is that despite all his intense belief to the contrary, he didn't pay us what we asked him to. Fortunately, this guy seems to make a virtue out of keeping his temper, and also, I'm good at handling people in almost all situations because I'm honest and tell them exactly what the story is, so they don't have to ferret it out of me and suspect me of bullshitting them. All in all, the conversation went pretty well. I bet he's a pretty decent dentist.

Then there is the extremely demanding, rude and stupid, and overpaid, woman at a big company, who used to constantly be on my ass about stupidity that she herself caused. You know, like this. What's taking so long for you to give me what I want? She would demand that of me. And I'd have to answer, you still haven't answered the questions you were asked two weeks ago, and we can't give you what you want until we have the facts. She used to be such a pain in the ass, a complaining, annoying, stupid pain in the ass, sort of a stereotype of a cranky woman in over her head and trying to prove herself in a man's world by being tough and demanding, when what she really needs to do is listen and be human, be herself, calm the fuck down and stop playing big bad Bertha.

Though she's in an influential high roller company and it would backfire on me badly to piss her off, since she has the ear of the boss any old time, I didn't want to put up with her shit because I'm not good with putting up with shit. I just told her not to be so demanding and critical. I put her in her place, a long time ago. And no, she didn't complain to the boss about what I said. Instead she puts on a happy face when she calls me, she says thank you when I do stuff for her, and it's sort of a Taming of the Shrew deal here, though she is still demanding, in a 'nice' way. And for my part, I reassure her that she's not being ignored and I'm on her side.

Well, she called again, and I had to deal with that polite but demanding puppy again. Miss Six Figures. At least she's house-broken now. She's sweet as honey in her voicemail messages to me, but she wants what she wants, and she's not nearly as stupid as she used to be when we first started, before she learned the ropes. Now she's asking intelligent questions. Sort of. Still a bit dumb, but sort of intelligent now. She has everything she asked for, and Monday I'll put it into a form that is so simple that even a third grader would get it, so I think she'll get it. I guess she's not a total idiot on the rest of her duties, or else she's fucking somebody, because she really isn't bright enough to be making that big salary. Dumbest person I deal with. Her only value to her company is that she's a pit bull.

Then there's the old folks home. They have the Oct 15 deadline, I have already done the work, it is the final work we'll ever do for them because their pension plan money is all gone, all paid out to the employees, nothing left at all. The work is sitting on my floor, waiting to be paid $500 in advance, because I KNOW that they will not pay for it once they've gotten it. There is a zero percent probability that these people will pay us for our work if they have it in their hands already. It's the final work. They don't need us anymore. Sayonara. So I sent out another letter telling them that the IRS fine will be thousands if they miss the deadline, so please send us that $500. I wonder if they will. And yes, I'll let them miss their fucking deadline if my company doesn't get their $500. Fuck em. I don't like to be played for a sap.

Then there's that nightmare case that I have given precedence to. It is a perfume company. I only got involved recently, after my friend Judy retired. It was her case. Last year they were told that they had to come up with $400,000 to put into their pension plan, and they damn near fainted. There was also a huge legal battle over it because the company that worked on them before us were not doing things the way they were supposed to, and that means land mine, boom! The whole fucking thing was wrong from the start. It had to be sent to a special government program that deals with absolute land mines that have exploded.

The odd thing is, even though this perfume company has been kind of fucked over from the start, they are always sweet to me, and to everyone else too. I guess the perfume rubbed off on them.

I tend to be really lucky. Cases that I am working on end up getting resolved a lot easier than it looked. It's like I have angels on my side, smoothing things out for whatever I'm involved in. Well, I just figured out how much the perfume company has to dump into their plan this year, and my answer is Nothing. Nothing. They're fine. No worries, mate. It's not that I did anything better than anyone else did. I just got lucky, or rather they just got lucky, but it happens time after time with me and I get to expect it. Maybe it is my compensation for having four Goddamn motherfucking kidney stones in my life so far.