David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

… 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 connections 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.