The Hidden Tax on Your Time

I called the Australian Taxation Office three times in one week. The first call connected but took so long I had to leave for a meeting before anything was resolved. The second call never connected at all. The third call reached a person after thirty minutes on hold, and what followed was two hours of my morning that I will never get back, two hours to answer a question my bookkeeper later resolved in an email I read in under two minutes.

That gap, two hours against two minutes, is what I keep returning to, because it is not just a story about one frustrating phone call, it is a story about where our time actually goes, and how quietly we have all agreed to accept the answer.

I want to say something carefully before I continue, because I know how easily this kind of writing can be misread. I came from Taiwan. I have lived in Australia for over ten years and I have not stopped working on my English for a single one of them. I know what it costs to speak a second language every day, the concentration it demands, the vulnerability it carries, the way a conversation can exhaust you in ways that are invisible to the person on the other end. So when I say I found it genuinely difficult to follow the ATO representative I spoke to, I am not speaking from a place of judgment about where she came from. I am speaking from a place of exhaustion, because when understanding breaks down and neither person can find solid ground, everything slows, and slow is expensive.

My partner, my personal partner at home, not a business partner, took the phone from me at a certain point. He is Australian, he has travelled widely, he is comfortable with accents, he began to frown within thirty seconds. I watched his face and knew what kind of morning we were both about to have. We asked for a simple explanation of one term. We were redirected to a website page. We asked again, in different words. We were redirected again. We stayed on that call for two hours and when we finally hung up I felt the way you feel at the end of a full working day, depleted, slightly hopeless, and behind on everything else I needed to do.

Then I wrote to my bookkeeper. I want to be clear, the task itself still had to go through ATO, there was no way around that, what I needed could only be set up directly with them. But the terms I had been asking the representative to explain, the very words I needed to understand in order to complete the process, my bookkeeper clarified in an email I read in under two minutes, completely and without a single doubt. That is what two hours of the ATO's time could not do, that a two minute email did effortlessly.

I manage two businesses. The pauses I allow myself are the hours I spend travelling to Melbourne for English lessons or to Wangaratta for community meetings, and even those are working hours in their own way. I say this not to perform busyness but because I think about time differently to how I used to, I think about what each hour is actually worth, and I think about the hours I spend inside systems that were never designed with someone like me in mind. The cost of that phone call, if I calculate what both her time and my time were worth during those two hours, is the price of a return flight to Taiwan. That is not a small thing to hand to a hold tone and a redirected webpage.

I am writing this because I notice how easily we absorb inefficiency as simply the nature of things, this is just how it works, this is just how long it takes, this is just the system. And I understand why we do it, because pushing back takes more energy than most of us have left by the time we reach the point of frustration. But I think about all the people making these calls, small business owners, new migrants, people who are already working twice as hard to be taken half as seriously, and I think about what they could have built with those two hours instead, and it sits with me.

We are always saying life is too short. We say it when something terrible happens and it shocks us back into gratitude. But life is also too short for thirty minutes of hold music and two hours of circular conversation and a question that had a two minute answer the whole time. The tragedy is not always the dramatic moment. Sometimes it is just the quiet accumulation of hours, handed away without ceremony, to systems that were not built with you in mind.