Procrastination

It is a kind of disease, I tell you!

We were given several months to do a simple 5-minute task of filing the income tax returns. HASIL also gave us a few methods to do the filing. Some people are still doing it through the conventional way—by posting the completed forms to HASIL. Some are doing it slightly faster by submitting the forms in person at the HASIL branches all over the country. But many people are doing it electronically by means of e-filing.

During the days running up to the deadline—today—HASIL also stationed their staff at high-pedestrian areas like shopping malls and post office etc. Apart from that, they also extended their working hours up to 10pm every night, including Saturdays and Sundays.

5 minutes! That's all the time's required to file the income tax returns. But, no—we waited till the very last minute. We just had to delay until the very day beyond which we will be subject to late penalty.

Mia and I arrived at HASIL at almost 11:00 am today. And the place was crowded with fellow procrastinators. It took us no less than 15 minutes to fight for a parking, and then had to walk a distance to HASIL. People were queuing—long, long queues—from the upper floor, on the staircase, and right down to the ground floor. The building was packed to its capacity. It was like a war zone!

After queuing for about half an hour, we finally got our forsaken number. And that number was for the purpose of getting into the queue to do the e-filing on the computers in that branch. Of course on an ordinary day, it's possible to do the e-filing thing from the comforts of our home. But since today's the last day, it's impossible to log on to the HASIL website—we simply had to do the e-filing at HASIL itself.

And so, after waiting for 124 numbers in the queue, it was finally our turn. I took about 5 minutes to complete mine, and Mia took more or less the same amount of time. Unfortunately, although my company has been deducting a portion of my monthly wages for income tax, I still fell short by a couple of hundred bucks, and I had to make full payment within today itself. It was the same story with Mia.

Then we went downstairs to get into yet another queue to get our number—this time the queue was for actually paying the tax. When we got the number, we had to wait 183 numbers before it was our turn. Finally, we were able to make the payments at around 2:30pm—a total of about 3.5 hours as opposed to the 5 minutes if we had just done it a week ago. Hard to believe that I survived it all.

It seems that Mia is very determined to do this whole e-filing thing from home next year, a few months before the deadline. But I have the funny feeling that she will soon forget all about it the next time we need to file our tax returns again.

I swear, procrastination is truly a disease!