David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

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.)

7 (Now you can probably see why this occasional ‘author’ appositive thing is sometimes necessary; it turned out that there were two separate David Wallaces posted at the Midwest REC, of whom the one who ended up accused of impersonation was guess who.)

1 Remote Fact Acquisition

2 Spontaneous Data Intrusion

* Meredith Rand becomes no less comely or beautiful when she speaks to someone else about ritualistically cutting herself and being pink-paper’d into the Zeller Center. But she does look abruptly older or more drawn. You can see, not just imagine but see the way her face will look at forty — which after all, as is well known, will be only a different form of beauty, a less received and more severe or ‘earned’ beauty, in which the emergent flaws and lines do not mar her beautiful features but rather frame them, show seams in a face that is made and not just stamped out at random. Meredith Rand’s nose and chin’s slight cleft shine slightly in the red light of the walls’ fake flames.