Not Phish Nuns

Trish is a couple months into her new gig with the Sisters of St. Joseph out in LaGrange.  No, she's not cloistered, she's the financial director for their retreat center out there and helps the sisters with various money situations, some serious some not.  And today, she got a reminder how necessary that help can be sometimes.

A little ways into the day, the center's HR director came into her office, looking nonplussed.  "I guess we haven't been paying our taxes," she said.  "The IRS sent us an email saying we need to get it sorted out."

Trish has been a CPA for quite a while now, so she knows to take our governmental friends seriously.  But this didn't smell right to her.  "Email?" she asked.  "Why don't you forward those to me."

She took a look at the three emails the HR director had received.  All looked to have come from the official IRS.gov website, listed specific account numbers, and explained in pretty tough language what would happen if the accounts weren't reconciled.

(editor's note -- as I heard the story this evening, my 20 years of IT experience told me exactly how it was going to end)

Official looking or not, my honey didn't just fall off the turnip truck yesterday.  She called the IRS directly to sort it out, and was told in no uncertain terms that when the Federales want to get their hooks into you, they do so via snail mail, not electronics.  They told her to forward the emails to their anti-phishing email address and get on with her life.

Overall, a relatively innocuous event, and it's not like any of our information is now in nefarious hands.  But it pissed her off (which, after 15 years of marriage, I could have told them was a very bad idea).  CC'ed on the email were a number of older nuns, some of whom might not be as savvy as Trish in dealing with communications of this type.  She quickly fired off an email to the group at large, warning them not to respond to the email and that everything was being taken care of.

There are times I weep for the state of America -- fast food on every corner, and a Kardashian on every channel.  The talentless performing for the tasteless.  If they ever played a Lady Gaga song on an episode of Jersey Shore, it might create a cultural singularity whose event horizon would swiftly (and mercifully) destroy us all.

But those irritants pale in comparison to the sheer evil of trying to fleece nuns of what little money they have.  God forbid the scrotal chancres who attempted this larceny spend half that much energy contributing to the welfare of the universe, rather than the ill-gotten pursuits that, if there's any justice in the universe, will fast-track them to one of Dante's more interesting levels.

Sometimes people suck.