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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Silver lining a mirage

Those of you have been reading this blog for a while know I hate the 2-in-5 rule. Then, I found a tiny little silver lining. Well, turns out it was just a mirage.

See, there used to be a rule that applicants had to "have reasonable plans to use all of the network drops within two years." But since the 2-in-5 rule basically means you can only get network drops every 3 years, the rule was softened from "two years" to a "few years."

Only now I find out the rule wasn't changed, only obfuscated. The "few years" was just a bit of fog covering the "two years" rule, which is still the law of the land. The Frankenstein-and-NOMAD-get-a-time-machine case that I've been working on for a year and a half is finally getting down to dollars and cents, and when push came to shove, the decree was that all drops had to be used within two years.

So can I count this as one of the many secret rules? It used to be public (and can be found on an old training slide), but now you can only learn about it when you've been stuck by the pointy end of it.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

OK, the Form 470 season, I can't wait for improvements to the online form. The page that's getting my goat this year: Block 4, Item 16.

First goatgetter: every time I review the page, I have to recheck the radio button signifying that there are no ineligible entities. Once I select it, shouldn't it stay selected unless I change it?

The other one is that I have to scroll past 50 rows where I can put in area codes and exchanges. Are there any applications that need 50 rows? California only has 37 area codes. I'd guess that only a very small percentage of applicants use more than 3 rows. Can we just have 5 rows and an "add more rows" button?