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The whooshing sound and a story that is no more

Time was, and not that long ago, when today's front page would have been graced, if not dominated, by a picture of long lines of headlights streaming into the late-night distance as procrastinating income-tax payers rushed to stuff their envelopes into waiting postal bins, purposely kept open to assure a midnight April 15 postmark.

Today, this column may be your only acknowledgment in the paper of a deadline frenzy that surely must still exist, though just as surely now takes place like everything else in the lonesome computer rooms forming the information highway, rather than in loops of idling traffic laced around the neighborhood post office.

Is tax procrastination not a story anymore? Lord knows for decades we covered it like one. Unfailingly. Thoroughly. Prominently. What happened?

For starters, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it probably was not much of a story to begin with. As a reporter who spent more than a couple of Tax Night Midnights trolling for clever quotes or unusual anecdotes and an editor who sent more than a couple reporters on that annual mission, I have to acknowledge that almost invariably the best part of this story was that one picture. The undulant wisps of exhaust floating skyward illuminated by those blazing yellow, impatient splotches of light, each pair suggesting the agony of some nervous, frustrated driver. It told a story of how we handle deadlines, and everyone could relate.

After that picture? Well, in my experience, the story was largely an exercise in trying to make shrugged shoulders seem poignant. In writing or reading scores of these stories, no doubt representing hundreds of individuals, about the only evidence of emotion I can recall is a sheepish grin and an infinitely variable collection of ways to say, "Aw, shucks. Guess I shoulda done this earlier, but I never do."

Not that the variant couldn't occasionally be memorable. I will never forget lurking under the hazy incandescence of the U.S. Post Office lobby in Saginaw, Michigan, fretting over a growing lack of drama when, 10 minutes before 12 o'clock, a jovial twenty-something young man sauntered through the door clutching a fistful of W-2s, a No. 2 pencil and a crumpled blue Form 1040 and proceeded, standing, to complete his tax report at a tall marble-topped table as other harried latecomers filed past. I was astonished.

"You're just starting your taxes now?" I asked as he scribbled, surprisingly unannoyed by my intrusion.

He just smiled and gave a sheepish laugh.

"Aw, shucks," he said. "Guess I shoulda done this earlier, but I never do."

Then, he folded his form into an envelope, licked a stamp and dropped his handiwork into a clanging metal bin.

In one of the introductions to his unfinished manuscript, "The Salmon of Doubt," the late Douglas Adams is quoted saying, "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

Adams died in 2001, so he lived in a time when it is conceivable that one could actually associate sounds with the urgency of an inescapable chore. In newspapers, we once proudly portrayed it visually in that bright string of automobile headlights. Now, it's just found in the soft hum of a PC in someone's lonely den, and we've finally figured out there's not much of a news story in a shrug.

But I wonder what if we could find someone who remembers licking stamps ...

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.

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