Overall, despite comprising scarcely more than 5,750 total words, the initial recruiting presentation and processing lasted almost three hours, during which there were also several intervals when the recruiter trailed off and sat in a heavy, incongruous silence during which he may or may not have been asleep — the sunglasses made it impossible to verify. (I would later be informed that these unexplained pauses, too, were part of initial recruit screening and ‘dispositional assessment,’ that the shabby recruiting office was, in fact, under sophisticated videotape surveillance — one of the required forms had contained an ‘Authorization to Record’ buried in one of the subclause’s boilerplate, which I obviously did not notice at the time — and that our fidget- and yawn-rates and certain characteristics of posture, position, and facial expression in certain contexts would be reviewed and compared to various psychological templates and predictive formulas which the Service’s Internal Control Branch’s Personnel Division’s Recruitment and Training subdivision had developed several years prior, which is, in turn, a very long and complicated story involving the Service’s emphasis, throughout the 1960s and ’70s, on maximizing ‘throughput,’ meaning the highest possible efficiency in terms of the volume of tax returns and documents that could be processed, examined, audited, and adjusted in a given fiscal quarter. Though the Service’s concept of efficiency would undergo changes in the 1980s, as new government priorities trickled down through the Treasury and Triple-Six, with an institutional emphasis on maximizing revenue rather than throughput of returns, the emphasis at the time — meaning January 1979—required screening recruits for a set of characteristics that boiled down to an ability to maintain concentration under conditions of extreme tedium, complication, confusion, and absence of comprehensive info. The Service was, in the words of one of the Examinations instructors at the Indianapolis TAC, looking for ‘cogs, not spark plugs.’
Eventually, it was beginning to get dark and to snow again by the time the recruiter announced that the process was over, and we — by this time there were perhaps five or six of us in the audience, some having drifted in during the formal presentation — were then each given a ream-sized stack of stapled packets of materials in a large blue IRS binder. The recruiter’s final instructions were that those of us who felt we were still potentially interested should go home and read these materials closely, and return the next day — which would, if I remember right, have been a Friday — for the next stage of the recruitment process.
To be honest, I had expected to be interviewed and asked all sorts of questions about my background, experience, and direction in terms of career and commitment. I expected that they would want to verify I was serious and not just there to scam the IRS out of free tuition funding. Not surprisingly, I had expected that the Internal Revenue Service — which my father, whose job with the city had understandably involved dealings with the IRS on a variety of levels, feared and respected — would be acutely sensitive to the possibility of being scammed or conned in any way, and I remember, on the long trek in from the bus stop, that I had been apprehensive about what to say in response to tough questioning about the origin of my interest and goals. I’d been concerned about how to tell the truth without the Service’s recruiters reacting the way the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs had just recently reacted, or thinking of me in anything like the way I had thought about the Christian girl with the multifloral boots in the Lindenhurst memory already mentioned. To the best of my recollection, though, I was required to say almost nothing that first day of recruiting after the initial hello and one or two innocuous questions — as well as my name, of course. Nearly all my input was, as I’ve mentioned, in the form of forms, many of which had bar codes in the lower left corners — this detail I remember because these were the first bar codes I can remember ever being aware of in my life up to then.
Anyhow, the recruiting office’s binder full of homework was so unbelievably dry and obscure that you essentially had to read each line several times to derive any sense of what it was trying to say. I almost couldn’t believe it. I had already gotten a taste of real accounting language from the assigned textbooks for Managerial Accounting and Auditing I, which were both just under way — when weather permitted — at DePaul, but the Service material made those textbooks look like child’s play by comparison. The largest single packet in the binder was something on low-toner Xerox called Statement of Procedural Rules, which is actually from Title 26, § 601 of the Code of Federal Regulations. A ninety-five-word section of a page that I remember that I flipped to at first at random and read, just to get an idea of what I would be having to try to read and process, was ¶1910, § 601.201a(1)(g), subpart xi: