§ 15 It’s Sylvanshine who’s the fact psychic, and Lehrl, who believes in the occult, has sent him to find and place the very finest GS-7 wigglers he can in a given group, so that when the A/NADA outperforms them on revenue, it’ll be convincing to Triple 6. This would require rewriting the Sylvanshine arrival sequence… S wants to become CPA because everyone else in Internal Control Systems is CPA? Or so that he can get out of the Service?
§ 19 It’s the HR guys who ultimately get replaced by computers — they’re too distractible, too into side-issues.
Glendenning’s kid in navy on ship off Iranian coast? Terrified he’s risking his life for an America that’s no longer worth fighting for.
§ 22 ‘Irrelevant Chris’ is irrelevant only on the subject of himself? On all other topics/subjects, he’s focused & cogent and interesting? Dictum on him around REC is that he’s OK as long as you keep him off the topic of himself — then you’re in for it?
Fogle ends up in IRS as the insufferable do-gooder that Stecyk was, as child?
‘Film interview’ a sham? Point is to extract from Chris Fogle the formula of numbers that permits total concentration? Point is he can’t remember — he wasn’t paying attention when he happened to read the series of documents that added up to the string of numbers that, when held in serial in his head, allows him to maintain interest and concentration at will? Has to be sort of tricked into it? Numbers have downside of incredible headache.
§ 24 Richard ‘Dick’ Tate is Director of Personnel. Ned Stecyk is his Deputy Director. Tate opposes Lehrl and ICS because he wants power, control — no power if fewer living personnel.
Glendenning ineffectual — lost in a mist of civic idealism — the actual REC is run mostly by Tate and Stecyk, and by the Information Systems person.
When DW and Stecyk lock eyes as Stecyk is soothing guy in his inner office, a look of tremendous compassion and sympathy spreads over Stecyk’s face, mainly because of DW’s hideous skin. Stecyk thus searches out DW and tries to be nice to him, figuring that he’s been shunned and traumatized his whole life. DW resents this — his position is that if people are shallow enough to regard someone’s skin as the be-all and end-all of his value and character, then fuck them; he doesn’t need them — but is ready to exploit Stecyk’s kindness in order to win various advantages for himself.
David Wallace, once settled, has thing where he’ll look out the window and see, in the other, more elite building, someone at a window in the computer center looking back. Wearing thick glasses. Their eyes meet but they never meet or say anything.
Light-blue Pacer with fish bumper sticker. This car is Lane Dean’s — who has to hurry like crazy in the AM because he goes to church services (or Sheri, his wife, does) at dawn, and is always on the edge of being late (Dean has become less fervently Christian since starting at REC, while Sheri has gotten more so) — that made this maneuver almost every morning.
§ 26 Stecyk knows about Blumquist. He was at the REC when Blumquist died. He was just out of the IRS academy in Columbus and working as a chalk leader in rotes. He was the one who had to interview the wigglers (in 1978?) who had continued coming to work and working for something like three days while Blumquist sat rigidly at his desk, deceased. Some of them had felt bad about this. A few put in for transfers. Stecyk will discover that Examiners’ total down-the-line audit revenue every month increases when Blumquist sits with them, not talking to them or distracting them but simply sitting there, being with them. Theorizes that double teams of Examiners might be worth the cost — the doubled salary might be exceeded by the overall realized audit-revenue. But how to get this idea sold? Region Personnel Director would want to know how this originally came to light… how can Stecyk refer to a ghost? Or perhaps this was the idea of a previous Personnel Deputy, who got in trouble, because Region figured that he’d tried the experiment with two actual examiners, meaning double salary. It this a plausible plotline?
What is Stecyk like now, as an adult? Still incredibly nice, but no longer a total dweeb? A bit sadder? A dispenser of pop-psych bromides? What happened to make him realize that the Niceness of his childhood was actually sadistic, pathological, selfish? That other people, too, want to feel nice and do favors, that he’d been massively selfish about generosity? In a college sport, did he keep letting other team score out of ‘niceness,’ and got a visit from a referee — someone dressed all in black and white, like Irrelevant Chris Fogle’s Jesuit in college — who very bluntly told him he was full of shit and that true decency was very different from pathological generosity, because pathological generosity did not take into account the feelings of the people who were the object of the generosity? Stecyk had caused traffic jams at 4-way stops by always letting everyone else go first? Or referee magically gives Stecyk insight into how his mother had felt when Stecyk got up very early every morning to do her housekeeping for her — like she was useless, like the family felt she was incompetent, etc. Stecyk tells David Wallace the story of the butterfly — if you let it out of the cocoon when it seems to be struggling and dying, then its wings don’t get strengthened and it can’t survive.
The pathologically nice is one of the basic types who gravitate to the IRS, because it’s such a grim, unpopular job — no gratitude, which only increases the sense of sacrifice.
Sylvanshine has a different take on Blumquist. Sylvanshine has educed that some of the very best Examiners — most attentive, most thorough — are those with some kind of trauma or abandonment in their past. He’s there to intuit which are the best so that they can be auditioned for the test against A/NADA. Blumquist, it turns out, had had brutal Fundamentalist parents — the kind for whom fans and mattresses were luxuries. They had a special punishment: they made him face the wall in the parlor — blank wall — stand there facing it for hours at a time. This was the trauma. There had been a mirror on the other wall behind him; it showed only his back. This is the image Sylvanshine gets for Blumquist: a view of his childhood back, very still, with a scrolled wooden frame around it. Blumquist had had productivity numbers that were much, much higher than anyone else’s, though he had declined offers to be promoted to higher civil service grade and managerial job. Sylvanshine looking for similarly great rote examiner, to do the series of tests against the A/NADA program and digital computer. Several of the recently transferred Examiners are among the very best tested rote examiners left at national RECs. Lehrl’s Systems boys want a fair test, the computer and A/NADA against the very finest rote examiners they can get… so that when the A/NADA crushes them, the test’ll be all that much more definitive.
§ 30 LEHRL & PRO-TECH VS. GLENDENNING & DISTRICT DIRECTORS: Project is replacing human Examiners with computers the way Lehrl invented Automated Collection Systems — the District Directors don’t want it, because they’re Old School IRS-as-Civics believers, whereas the new school has a corporate philosophy: maximize revenue while minimizing costs. Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one.
Charles Lehrl preparing to computerize Exams the way he computerized Automated Collection System in Collections — the experiments there were in Rome and Philadelphia. Invented the IRP that compares W2s and 1099s to Returns — made Examiners’ jobs otiose.
Reynolds & Sylvanshine (lovers? roomies?) vie for Lehrl’s attention & favor like courtiers or children — it’s how they pass the time in the dullness of IRS intrigue.