The IRS is Friendly and Efficient

So, a few weeks ago I received a letter in the mail from the IRS saying I owed them $4,854. Needless to say, I found this alarming. Upon inspection, however,I realized that what had happened was that somehow the IRS took the stock options I had exercised in 2005 (and had already paid taxes on) and decided that the gross of those stock sales was unreported income. In other words, back in 2005 I got a net of somewhere in the neighborhood of $4,000 on the exercise, which I had then paid taxes on, and now the IRS thought that I had $17,000 of unreported income. So I got various documents from my old employer and the broker, filled out some IRS paperwork, wrote a cover letter, put them all in an envelope, and before planning to take them over to the post office, I decided to call up the IRS to make sure I was doing everything by their deadline.

After introductions, the conversation went basically as follows:

Me: I'm wondering if I'm OK on the deadline or if I need to ask for an extension.
IRS lady ("Mrs. Boyington"): First, what was the issue?
Me: I exercised some stock options and I got a letter saying I owed taxes on the gross, not the---
Mrs. Boyington: Stock options? Oh, OK. I can take care of that.
Me: Really? I have the paperwork here that I was going to send in.
Mrs. Boyington: That's not necessary. I can make this go away here on the phone.

So it all got taken care of in about a 3-minute phone conversation. Thanks, IRS!