Day 15/365 - Math Problems

Emphasis on the 'problems' part. This is what you get when you make an attorney do math. I realized after I took this shot that my calculations looked a lot like the rantings of the crazy homeless guy from a few posts ago. Who knows, maybe once upon a time he was an attorney who was forced to work with numbers and it drove him stark, raving bonkers.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon and this morning reviewing the assets and liabilities of a married couple who own a government contracting company and winnowing through their tax returns to try and figure out how much of their collective income was attributable to each spouse. They had applied for certification as a disadvantaged business and I had to see if the program office's determination that the couple was not economically disadvantaged was legally supportable. Which meant I had to do math.

Math is not my friend. It was always my worst (and least favorite) subject in school. It's not a widely known fact, but most lawyers are terrible at anything involving numbers. We tend to react to numbers like Superman does to Kryptonite and vampires do to crosses. If we were good at math we wouldn't go to law school. We'd be doctors or scientists or engineers instead (or in my case, an architect), or something useful like that. But we suck at math so we wind up lawyers by default.

After a lengthy and awkward struggle (and a bit of cheating using the QuickMath automatic math solutions website -- man I love that website), I was finallly able to determine that the couple's adjusted net worth was below the $750,000 threshold but their average two-year incomes were in excess of $200,000, which put them in the upper percentiles of all U.S. taxpayers and therefore precluded them from being deemed economically disadvantaged.

Anyone who wasn't math illiterate probably could've figured that out in about 20 minutes, tops. Making an attorney do math is like giving a monkey a chainsaw -- it might turn out all right, but the odds are it's going to result in something messy and unpleasant.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)