Hah.

I had two investments the past couple years that involved calculating "depletion" (which means a Schedule E and all of that). I did the calculations over break, had my forms done but not sent in.

My dad had the same thing for one thing. He called me up last week and went over the calculations; I had done them right.

Then he called last night. No, no, he had redone the calculations, the depletion was MUCH lower than what I had calculated and how had I got that number and I was going to have to go back and totally redo everything.

Not something I wanted to hear then. I was tired, my allergies were bad, I was still thinking about the program reviewer's comments (the summary: we are an excellent department but we have to hold off on all the things that could make us even more excellent because they cost money, and we have to be "sensitive" to the fact that it's a bad economy. Oh, and we're probably being worked to death.)

We went back and forth about it but reached no resolution, and after the phone call I was unhappy and contemplating having to re-re-calculate my taxes before finally sending them in. (I would still get a refund, it would just be smaller. It was, however, the thought of having to crunch the numbers yet again that seemed daunting).

Well, I open my e-mail this morning and find a note from him. I was right and he was wrong.

Look, don't doubt your statistician daughter, OK? Doing tedious number-crunching is something we are good at.