Sales Slips and Taxes

         Taxes (φ ό ρ ο υ ς ) is probably the most feared word in the Greek language. Greeks historically have had an aversion to paying any kind of tax, for what ever purpose, and have gone to great lengths in avoiding them. With the economic depression still going on (as this is 2012), the current Greek government in it’s ongoing efforts to raise revenues, not only tightened  tax laws, but also introduced a plethora of new taxes to be imposed on the population. This has led the Greeks to believe that the last several elected governments have been nothing more than a kleptocracy rather than a democracy, each one more corrupt than the last, bolstered by years of cronyism.

With the introduction of the new income tax came new challenges for the Greek taxpayer in trying to circumvent this hated legislation. According to the new tax a deduction would be given based on the kinds and amount of sales receipts one has accumulated during the year. Consequently, taxes are reduced correspondingly based on the tax bracket one finds himself in. So, throughout the year everyone is squirreling away sales receipts from a few Euro cents to mega Euro purchases. This has led to intriguing phenomena in which people are trading sales slips, as I remember trading baseball cards as a kid. “I’ll give you two of my apparel receipts for one of your gas receipts.” Or if a relative hasn't reached his or her maximum deductions, other family members may pitch in and donate some of their sales slips. What you can find in every household is a large shoe box brimming full of sales receipts that have to be kept for a year. If one has an accountant, then he has to safely store these receipts for all his clients.

During the summer of 2012, as we started a huge kitchen renovation project, I too started to accumulate large quantities of sales slips that I consciously hoarded in a size 44 shoe box. Then it

occurred to me, since sales receipts were such a valuable commodity and in high demand, maybe I could make some extra money and auction them to the highest bidder. It was a fleeting thought, because I knew deep inside I would just give them away. Sure enough, by the end of the summer my niece wound up with my size 44 shoe box packed full of sales receipts, everything from a bag of pistachios to a new kitchen sink. So, maybe this just proves what the arch conservative, Barry Goldwater once said about income taxes, “The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.”

OTE

                                      

OTE are the three letters that represented the omnipresent Greek telephone company even on our little island of Ikaria. A neighbor of ours happened to be walking past our house cradling a phone in his arms one early morning looking rather confused and in a state of mild agitation. Noting his disposition, as a neighbor who normally is a happy go lucky kind of a guy, I immediately asked, “Why such a sullen face on such a beautiful morning?”

 “Well,” he said, “You know I have had my name on the list to get a land line from OTE for years. Finally, about a year ago they notified me that I was next on the list, and within a month they came and installed  my  phone. Since then I have had nothing but trouble and annoyance with OTE. Everything from poor phone reception, to no reception, to billing problems, but what took the cake was my ordeal with them yesterday. Once again I called OTE to complain about the spotty phone service I was receiving. I told them I would be on the phone talking, and without warning my call would be cut off. Sometimes if I stayed on the line for two or three minutes service would resume, only to be disconnected again a few minutes later. ‘Apparently’, said the OTE technician while checking my line, ‘your phone seems to be working fine now, what I suggest you do in the future is to call us back when your phone is not working’. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, so I just hung up on him. That’s why I’m on my way to Agios to dump this junky OTE phone and get myself into the 21^st century with a reliable cell phone.”

         This fleeting incident reminded me of the T.V. comedy “Laugh-In,” back in the 60’s, you might recall Lily Tomlin’s character, Ernestine, as a dismissive and condescending phone operator. Her celebrated parting words at the end of each sketches was, “We don’t care, we don’t have to, we’re the phone company.”

What Garbage??

As so often happens among Aegean islands, small squabbles, usually concerning fishing,

politics or who has the best dancers, emerge, are highlighted for a while, and then dissipate over the Aegean Sea. Occasionally though, an unusual crises crops up and takes center stage as it did on Ikaria in 2012.With Ikaria entering the disposable material age years ago, one could no longer burn tidy little bags of garbage in ones back yard, and with the increase of tourist every summer, the amount of garbage exceeded the local capacity to handle the overflow. The Ikarian officials invested in new Mercedes Benz garbage trucks, put out a variety of bins to collect recyclables, and opened up a dump in the middle of the island to deal with the abundance of discarded rubbish. Slowly though, the dump filled up and could no longer handle the constant arrival and dumping of the garbage trucks, and was forced to close. This presented a dilemma for the local officials as the bins brimmed over, and the garbage started to pile up in the streets.

Sometime during the discussions of what to do with this aggregate of trash, a decision was reached by the local authorities to pile the garbage onto a barge and take it somewhere, but where? The approved suggestion was to secretly, in the dark of night, float this barge to the neighboring islands of Fourni. Since the islands are sparsely populated, there would be ample room to accommodate the ever increasing collection of trash from Ikaria. The garbage was quickly gathered and loaded onto an enormous barge and deployed for its’ two hour trip to Fourni.

The secrecy of this mission unfortunately was compromised when the locals on Fourni, hearing from an inside source, of the covert Ikarian operation, mounted their own stealth counterattack. There to meet the phantom barge, in the dead of night, was a delegation of Fournotes, who adamantly forced the unwanted and malodorous barge to turn around and make a hasty retreat back to Ikaria.

Stuck with this smelly barge, authorities once again met to decide the outcome of this traveling garbage pile. In the meantime, Ikarians were becoming irritated with the

slow progress of the garbage issue, and public resentment resonated across the island. Finally, after weeks and much consternation, negotiations by the local authorities were completed for the acceptance of the barge by another neighboring island. This island, seeing the profitable silver lining in the Ikarian trash, demanded payment up front in order to take in the garbage for the rest of the year. So, if by chance you are island hopping around the Aegean Sea be sure to keep a lookout for the floating garbage pile, but then again you probably will smell it before you see it.