Carpet tax

We, and by "we" here I mean Hox and Erix SRL our hugely successful company, received a registered letter the other day. Actually we received a piece of paper informing us that we had to go to the post office to pick up a registered letter, but the upshot of it all was that we had in our hands a registered letter. It was from the Romanian tax authorities and was a detailed description of our tax debts for the year, by quarter. We had, of course, already paid our taxes, this letter was just to let us know what extra we had to pay. A total of 3 Lei (three quarters of 1 Lei each, and one quarter where we owed nothing). Three NEW lei, I should stress here, not three old lei. (3 New Lei is about 80 Eurocents, while 3 Old Lei would be about .008 of a cent.) Registered mail is not especially cheap here, although presumably the government gives itself a discount, but even so, I'm guessing there is a net loss to the tax people from this letter - adding up the cost of calculating it, printing it out, stamping it umpteen times, the labour of all the signatures, and then collecting and cashing out the money to the cost of sending a registered letter. And apparently (meaning: our accountant said so) more or less everyone gets one of these letters at this time of the year. The purpose (allegedly) is to keep everyone working in the employee heavy tax office, and to make it clear to the outside world that they are gainfully employed and busy.

Temperature update

It is getting warmer! It was only -19 this morning! I wonder if I can find out what the average temerature for January was in Csikszereda this year. I reckon it was probably somewhere between -15 and -20. Average. Roll on February.