As I may or may not have mentioned, it was already well past the mandated 1340h. reporting time stamped on my 141-PO. Certain obvious and understandable emotions attended this fact, especially since (a) 0.0 percent of this lateness was my fault, and (b) the closer we got to the REC, the slower our progress in traffic became. In order to distract myself from these facts and emotions, I began to compile a list of the logistical absurdities that became evident once the Service vehicle got close enough to the entrance for the REC’s access road to become visible through my unoccluded side window. The following are condensed from an unusually long, intense, unpunctuated notebook entry26 composed at least in part within the Gremlin itself. To wit:
Besides the oncoming left turns and the loathsome me-firsters trying to remerge from the breakdown lane, the main cause of the excruciating slowness with which our line of cars on the westbound Self-Storage south of the city inched forward to make the right turn into the Examination Center’s access road was what emerged as the even worse, more costive and paralyzed jam of vehicles on the access road itself. This was chiefly caused by the fact that the access road’s appended parking lots were already quite full, and that the farther along the access road the lots were, the fuller they were, and full also of IRS employee vehicles trolling for available parking places. Given the extreme heat and humidity, the most desirable parking lots were clearly the ones directly behind27 the main building, less than a hundred yards from the central REC entrance. Employees in the more peripheral lots were required to walk along the narrow, ditch-flanked access road all the way around behind28 to that central entrance, which resulted in a great deal of teetering along the access road’s unpaved edge, plus some staggering and windmilling of arms; and we saw at least one employee slip and cartwheel into the drainage ditch by the road’s side and have to be pulled manually back up by two or three others, all of whom held their hats to their heads with one hand, such that the rescued employee then had an enormous smeary grass stain all the way up one side of his slacks and sport coat, and dragged one seemingly injured leg behind him as he and his companions passed from view along the road’s curve.29 The whole problem was as obvious as it was stupid. Given the heat, hassle, and actual danger of pedestrian travel along the access road, it was totally understandable that most employee vehicles seemed to eschew the nearer (that is, nearer to us, hence farther from the REC itself) lots and to proceed to the far more desirable lots around back, lots that turned out to be closest to the main REC entrance and to be separated from it only by a wide, paved, and easily traversed plaza. But if those best, closest lots were full (as of course, given human nature and the above incentives, they were likely to be; the most desirable lots will obviously also be the most crowded lots), the incoming vehicles could not backtrack out the way they came in order to settle for spots in the progressively more distant and less desirable lots they had passed on their way in quest of the best lots — for, of course, the access road was one-way30 all the way around its curve, so vehicles that couldn’t find a spot in the best lots had now to proceed forward all the way back out away from the REC to the EXIT ONLY sign, turn left without any kind of light onto Self-Storage, drive the several hundred yards east back to the REC entrance with its ENTRANCE ONLY sign, and then try to turn left (against oncoming traffic, which obviously further slowed our own, westbound lane’s tortured progress) into the access road again in order to park in some of the less desirable lots out nearer the parkway, from which they then had to join the line of pedestrians tightrope-walking along the road’s edge back toward the main entrance around back.
In short, it all seemed like just phenomenally bad planning, resulting in gross inefficiency, waste, and frustration for everyone involved.31 Three obvious remedies presented themselves, which were sketched in outline form in my notebook, although whether I jotted them down right there in situ during the maddening Sisyphean so-near-and-yet-far stasis or entered them later that day — during which there were plenty of additional stretches of downtime with nothing to do except read the vapid book I’d already begun mordantly annotating on the bus ride — I will not pretend to recall. One remedy would be to institute some form of reserved parking, which would eliminate a good deal of the backup and clot resulting from people trolling for available spaces in the lots, as well as the ‘incentive’ problem of employee vehicles all beelining for the most desirable two or three lots near the REC’s central entrance (which of course we hadn’t yet seen from Self-Storage Parkway; the entrance’s location was deduced from the apparent desirability of the parking lots behind [from our perspective] the building, given the number of cars heading for it, which was clearly linked to some form of tangible incentive. The employee beside me now looked, peripherally, as though he’d been mechanically raised out of a body of water, which made the pretense of my not noticing the incredible sweating even more creepy and farcical). Another anodyne would obviously be to widen the access road and make it two-way. Admittedly, this could expose the REC to some additional short-term inconvenience and snarl along the same general lines as the widening of Self-Storage Parkway, although it was difficult to envision the widening of the access road taking anywhere near as long, since it wouldn’t be subject to the delays and conflicting agendas of the democratic process. The third remedy would be to sacrifice, for the greater good and convenience of everyone except perhaps the REC’s landscaping contractor, the virid expanse of the empty front (i.e., what turned out to be the rear) lawn, and to place on it not only a paved walkway but maybe an actual transverse spur that would allow vehicles on the EXIT portion of the road to cross back over to the ENTRANCE portion without having to make lightless left turns both onto and off the jammed parkway. Not to mention of course simply placing some goddamn traffic lights at the two intersections, which it was next to impossible to imagine the Internal Revenue Service not having enough suction with the municipal and state authorities to be able to demand just about any time it pleased.32 Not to mention the sheer strangeness of having it be (it emerged) the REC’s mammoth rear facing Peoria’s main orbital road. It seemed, on slow approach, both craven and arrogant, like pre-modern priests who faced away from the communicants during Catholic mass. Everything from logistics to elementary civics would seem to dictate that a major government facility’s front should face the public it serves. (Recall that I had not yet seen the REC’s stylized front facade, which was identical to those of the nation’s other six RECs, and had been installed after an uncaught typo in the enlarged construction and technology budget after the King Commission IRS reforms had been permitted to pass into law, that typo mandating that Regional Service and Examination Centers’ facades’ ‘form specifications’ rather than ‘formal specifications’ be ‘… matched as closely as possible to the specific services the centers perform.’33)