60 (whose personal strengths did not include perceptiveness—and I am far from the only member of the family to observe this; trust me)
61 There was, though, an oral exchange that I overheard involving two or possibly three unseen voices in the narrow hallway my chair was near the ingress of, from two REC personnel presumably standing waiting in some sort of line in that hallway, which I remember (the exchange) in detail because the waiting area’s fluorescent lighting was gray-white and blinding and shadowless, the kind of light that makes people want to kill themselves, and I couldn’t imagine spending nine hours a day in light like this, and so I was emotionally primed to pick this exchange out of the overall ambient noise of the room’s exchanges, even though I could see neither party who was speaking; and I actually transcribed parts of the conversation in real time in a kind of personal shorthand on the inside of the pop psychology book’s front cover, in order to transfer it later to the notebook (which is why I am able now to recount it in such potentially suspicious-looking detail); to wit:
‘That’s the short version?’
‘Well, the point is just that Systems is not uncreative. You can’t paint them all with the same brush.’
‘Not uncreative? What kind of word is that?’
‘The up-front cost-savings of fluorescent lights were obvious. All you had to do was compare power bills. Fluorescent lighting in Exam Centers was doctrine. But Lehrl found, at least in La Junta, that replacing the inset fluorescents with banked incandescents and desk lamps increased efficiency.’
‘No, all the Systems boys found is that throughput of returns increased after fluorescents were changed out for lamps.’
‘Again, no. What Lehrl’s team found was that the net audit receipts of the Western REC’s monthly throughput increased, for each of the three quarters following the installation of incandescents, by an amount next to which the combined installation cost and increased monthly power cost of incandescents was almost negligible, assuming you amortized the one-time expense of taking out all the fluorescents and fixing the ceiling.’
‘But they never did prove that the incandescents had a direct causal link to the increased audit receipts.’
‘But how do you prove that? A Region’s balance sheet is thousands of separate pages. The increased receipts flowed from district offices spread all over the West. There’s too many variables to account for—a single connection is unprovable. That’s why it requires creativity. Lehrl’s boys knew there was a correlation. They could just never get anyone at Triple-Six to accept it.’
‘That’s your interpretation.’
‘They want everything quantified. But how do you quantify morale?’
… which transcription ended up making the book somewhat valuable, in terms of reproduction, decades later. So it was both a waste and not, depending on one’s perspective and context.
62 The Personnel Director’s own large office was down at the end of one of the waiting area’s radial corridors. As I would learn later, Mr. Tate, like many senior administrators, preferred to work out of view; he rarely interacted with anyone below the rank of GS-15.
63 These, I learned, were ‘turdnagels,’ which term referred to low-grade or seasonal IRS support staff tasked mainly to inputting or extracting data on the REC’s computer systems. Many of them were students at either the local junior college or Peoria College of Business, which was not an elite school. Like many low-caste or marginal groups, turdnagels turned out to be very tight-knit and exclusive, even when some of them were assigned to ‘cart boy’ duty and as a result tended to know and exchange pleasantries with many of the wigglers and higher-ranked immersives whose exam materials and supplies they (i.e., the turdnagels) had to courier back and forth in large carts filled with individual levels and boxes and trays that could be expanded like some enormous tackle box’s tiers of compartments, so that the carts became enormous, complicated Rube Goldberg–like versions of a regular grocery or mail-room cart, and of which some (meaning the carts) clattered badly when they were pushed, because of all the moving parts and jerry-rigged tiers and compartments.
64 (signifying that the first kid said nothing)
65 More accurately, it was someone I presumed to be a man…. From my perspective, which was primarily behind the hunched person, he/she appeared to be wearing a suit jacket whose padded shoulders, in that era, were unisex.
66 (again, my assumption)
67 In effect, these people were standing in a kind of preliminary line just to enter the three hallways’ lines in order to see various mid-level Personnel officers like Mrs. van Hool, who was just at that minute (extrapolating backward from Ms. Neti-Neti’s imminent reappearance with the signed Form 706-IC) issuing her a crisp, decisive set of instructions as to what was to be done with and for the valued, veteran, high-ranking immersive exams specialist they believed me to be. (N.B. That examiner, transferred from Philadelphia’s Northeast REC, being not only named David Wallace but having also been scheduled to arrive the following day, and whom the Iranian Crisis had actually been dispatched to wait for and personally escort, the Personnel computer systems having made a conflation error that will be explained in §38, and in effect collapsing that second, later-arriving David Wallace into me, explaining both the mistaken identity and the mistaken day… all of which it goes without saying is post facto knowledge that I had no way of either knowing or guessing at the time, since ‘David Wallace,’ though hardly the rarest name in the United States, is also not all that common. Nor did I or anyone else know, obviously, on May 15—on which date the other, older, more ‘valuable’ David Wallace was clearing out his Tingle table’s trays and helping a senior cart boy collate and organize the files and supporting documents for distribution to other members of his Immersives Team in preparation for his transfer and flight the following day—that when, the following day, this senior transfer arrived at the appointed time and tried to check in at the GS-13 Intake Station in the Midwest REC lobby, he would be unable to do so—to check in and be permitted to proceed to the line for his new REC badge—because the GS-13 Intake Station would of course have him already listed as checked in and issued a new ID, that badge and GS-13 ID number (which was that other David Wallace’s; he’d received it twelve years prior) having been already issued in Peoria to me, the author and ‘real’ (to me) David Wallace, who was obviously in no position to understand or explain (later) that the whole thing was an administrative fuck-up and not an intentional attempt to supplant or impersonate an IRS GS-13 with over twelve years of devoted service at a job whose difficulty and arcane complication I would shortly start discovering; but in any event, this snafu would end up explaining not just the effusive welcome and mistakenly high civil service grade and salary (which I won’t pretend I wasn’t pleasantly surprised by, albeit of course puzzled) but also, partly, the strange and—for me—pretty much unprecedented interlude in the dark electrical closet off one of the radial hallways extending from the Level 1 central corridor with Ms. Neti-Neti shortly after I was conducted to the head of the ID line and issued the new badge, in which (i.e., incident in the electrical closet) she backed me up against a warm series of inset circuit-boxes and administered what would, according to former president W. J. Clinton, not properly be considered ‘sex,’ but which to me was far and away the most sexual thing that had happened or would happen to me until almost 1989, all of which eventuated because of both the Personnel computer’s failure to distinguish between two different internal David Wallaces and Mrs. van Hool’s apparent instruction to Ms. Neti-Neti to extend to ‘me’ (i.e., to the GS-13 they’d so heavily recruited and gotten to transfer from the Northeast REC’s elite Immersive Pod) ‘every courtesy,’ which it emerged was a very loaded and psychologically charged term for Chahla Neti-Neti, who’d come of economic age in the sybaritic but highly etiquette- and euphemism-intensive culture of pre-Revolutionary Iran (I learned this only later, obviously), and had, like many other nubile younger Iranian women with familial connect
ions to the existing government, had to basically ‘trade’ or ‘barter’ sexual activities with high-level functionaries in order to get herself and two or three other members of her family out of Iran during the tense period when the displacement of the shah’s regime was becoming more and more certain, and to whom ‘extend[ing] every courtesy’ therefore translated into a rapid, almost woodpeckerishly intensive round of fellatio, this apparently being the preferred method of pleasuring government functionaries from whom one sought favor but upon whose face one did not wish or could not bear to look. But it was still really exciting, albeit—for obvious reasons—extremely brief, and also helps explain why it was such a long time before I even realized that I’d left one of my pieces of luggage on the floor of the Personnel office’s waiting area…. All of which background also would later explain the sobriquet ‘Iranian Crisis’ for Ms. Chahla Neti-Neti, whose breasts’ shapes against the damp corduroy of my upper legs remain one of the most vivid sensuous memories of that whole cluster-fuck of my first several days as an IRS immersive.
68 (again helping to account for the gender confusion…)
1 (a female Jew)
2 Production quotas are a reality in the Service. This is not difficult to understand. Given numerous and repeated public statements to the contrary by top officials at Triple-Six, however, all such internal quotas are required to be kept and recorded in code. At the same time, administrators view the knowledge of such quotas as valuable performance incentives, which is why the Compliance Branch mandates and authorizes internal codes that are laughably familiar to most auditors. The Charleston code, in which C stands for the number 0 and H stands for 1, dot, dot, dot, up to N’s standing for 9, is today most commonly employed by retailers who use a perpetual inventory system which must include the nominal cost of goods sold in each transaction record. Thus, an item’s retail price tag at, let us say, a rural IGA supermarket will include both the retail price in digits and the CGS or distributor’s unit price in Charleston code, often at the tag’s lower border. Thus, anyone familiar with the code can determine from, let us say, a $1.49 retail price and a tiny TE beneath it, that the unit markup here is nearly 100 percent, and that the IGA supermarket he is patronizing is either disposed to gouge or has extraordinary retail overhead, possibly involving poorly leveraged debt—a common problem with the management of Midwest supermarket chains. On the other hand, one advantage of the Charleston code is that inflating its Schedule A’s Cost of Goods Sold is one of the most common and effective ways for a retail franchise to cook down its Line 33, especially if the retailer uses one type of code for CGS and its distributor another type of code for its receivables—and most distributors use a much more sophisticated octal PIS code. This is why so many large corporate audits are coordinated to review all different levels of the supply chain simultaneously. Such coordinated audits are handled out of Region, often also using specially selected GS-13 examiners from the Regional Exam Center; we do not conduct such audits at the District level.
3 (I observed that one of the elastic wristlets of its yellow chamois jumper was soaked through with saliva and appeared, for several inches up the infant’s forearm, darker than the other wristlet, which the infant appeared to ignore and I certainly did not mention or foresee doing anything about)
1 Because of the heavy, more or less uninterrupted volume of data the IRS processes, its computer systems had been constructed on the fly and had to be maintained and upgraded the same way. The situation was analogous to maintaining a freeway whose high volume of traffic both necessitates and hinders serious maintenance (i.e., there is no way simply to close the road in order to fix the whole thing at one time; there’s no way to divert all that traffic). In hindsight, it would ultimately have been cheaper and more efficient to shut the entire Service down for a brief period and transfer everything to a modern, freshly installed disk-based system, nationwide. At the time, though, this seemed unimaginable, especially in light of the Rome NY REC’s spectacular 1982 meltdown under the pressures of a cumulative backlog. So many of the fixes and upgrades were temporary and partial and, in retrospect, wildly inefficient, e.g. trying to increase processing power by altering antiquated equipment to accommodate slightly less antiquated computer cards (plus Powers cards had round holes instead of Holleriths’ old square ones, requiring all kinds of violent alterations for Fornix equipment that was already old and fragile).
2 What might appear to a layman as the obvious problem caused by this debugging—i.e., the loss of the system’s ability to recognize and classify IRS demotions—was not in fact much of a problem, comparatively, for Personnel. The fact is that fewer than .002 percent of Internal Revenue Service employees are ever demoted in grade, thanks in large part to the collective-bargaining power of the National Association of Treasury Employees. In effect, the conditions and procedural hurdles required for demotion were gradually strengthened until in most cases they were no less stringent than those required for termination with cause… although this is all very much a side issue, mentioned only to head off certain possible confusions on the part of the reader.
3 (which, again, was actually the main building’s ground floor)
4 It’s probably worth noting two additional bugs or systemic weaknesses or whatever that contributed to the fuck-up and my initial misassignment at Post 047. The first problem was that, due to limitations imposed by the reconfiguration of certain core programs to accommodate round-holed ninety-column Powers cards, the Personnel computer system’s file labels could accommodate only an employee’s middle initial, which in the case of David Francis Wallace, incoming high-value transfer from Philadelphia, was not enough to distinguish him in the system from David Foster Wallace, incoming low-value contract hire. The second, much more serious problem was that IRS Personnel’s original Social Security numbers (i.e., the civilian SSs issued to them in childhood) are always deleted and replaced systemwide by the new, IRS-issued SSs that serve also as Service IDs. An employee’s original SS is ‘stored’ only on his original employment application—which applications are always copied to microfiche and stored in the National Records Center, which NRC by 1981 was dispersed throughout a dozen different regional annexes and warehouse complexes and was notoriously ill-managed and disorganized and difficult to extract specific records from in any kind of timely way. Plus the Personnel systems’ file labels can accommodate only one SS # anyway, and that’s obviously going to be the new ‘9’-based SS that functions as one’s Service ID number. And since the 975-04-2012 that the new, low-value David F. Wallace was issued upon Expedited Intake was also the 975-04-2012 Service ID # of the older, high-value GS-13 David F. Wallace, the two employees became, so far as the Service’s computer system was concerned, the same person.
5 In retrospect, it’s now clear that there was actually a third, even more severe systemic problem, which was that, prior to 1987, the Service’s computer systems were organized around what’s now known as a ‘Bad Wheel’ model of network integration. Again, there’s a great deal of arcana and explanation—most of it involving not only the trying-to-maintain-a-freeway-while-still-letting-people-use-it maintenance situation detailed above but also the piecemeal and jerry-rigged quality of systems whose maintenance depended on annual budget allocations to the Technical Branch, which for a variety of bureaucratic/political reasons fluctuated wildly from year to year—but the point of the Bad Wheel thing was that Technical Branch’s networking setup through the mid-1980s resembled a wheel with a hub but no rim. In terms of computer interface, everything had to go through Martinsburg’s NCC. A transfer of data from Peoria’s Midwest Regional Exam Center to Midwest Region HQ up in Joliet, for example, actually entailed two separate data transfers, the first from Peoria to Martinsburg and the second from Martinsburg to Joliet. Martinsburg’s modems and dedicated lines were (for that era) high-baud and efficient, but there was still often a delay in ‘routing time,’ which bland term actually referred to incoming data’s sitting there in Martinsburg’s
Fornix mainframes’ magnetic cores until that data’s turn came up in the routing queue. Meaning there was always a lag. And, for understandable reasons, the queue was always longest and the lag worst in the weeks following April 15’s tidal influx of individual tax returns. Had there been anything like lateral networking in the IRS system—i.e., had the Midwest REC’s Systems/Personnel computers been able to interface directly with their Systems/Personnel counterparts at the Northeast REC in Philadelphia, the whole David F. Wallace swivet could have been resolved (and unjust blame averted) much more quickly. (Not to mention that the whole rimless-wheel model was at odds with the much-touted decentralization of the Service following the 1952 King Commission report, not much of which is relevant here except in that it just adds to the overall Rube Goldberg idiocy of the whole setup.)
6 (This was the latest published data available, and the Service had to rely exclusively on published data because the US Dept. of Commerce’s new UNIVAC system was incompatible with the more antiquated Fornix hardware that Martinsburg was still using.)