The chair is unpadded. It’s all very spartan. The light is the REC’s fluorescence; there are no lamps or bounces. No makeup, though in the prebriefing examiners’ hair is carefully combed, sleeves rolled up exactly three flat turns, blouses opened at the top button, ID cards unclipped from the breast pocket. No director per se in the room; no one to say to act natural or tell them about the loopholes of editing. A technician at the tripod’s camera, a boom man with headphones for levels, and the documentarian. The Celotex drop ceiling’s been removed for acoustical reasons. Exposed piping and four-color bundles of wire running above the former ceiling’s struts, out of the frame. The shot is just the examiner in the folding chair before a cream-colored screen that blocks off a wall of blank Hollerith cards in cardboard flats. The room could be anywhere, nowhere. Some of this is explained, theorized in advance; the prebriefing is precisely orchestrated. A tight shot, they explain, from the torso up, extraneous movements discouraged. Examiners are used to keeping still. There’s a monitor room, a former closet, attached, with Toni Ware and an off-clock tech inside, watching. It’s a video monitor. They are miked for the earplug that the documentarian/interlocutor stops wearing when it turns out to emit a piercing feedback sound whenever the Fornix card reader across the wall runs a particular subroutine. The monitor is video, like the camera, with no lighting or makeup. Pale and stunned, faces’ planes queerly shadowed — this is not a problem, though on video some of the faces are a drained gray-white. Eyes are a problem. If the examiner looks at the documentarian instead of the camera, it can appear evasive or coerced. It’s not optimal, and the prebriefer’s advice is to look into the camera as one would a trusted friend’s eyes, or a mirror, depending.
The prebriefers, both GS-13s on loan from some Post where Tate has unspecified suction, were themselves prebriefed in Stecyk’s office. Both are credible, in coordinated navy and brown, the woman with something hard beneath the charm that suggests an ascent through Collections. The man is a blank to Ware, though; he could be from anywhere.
As is to be expected, some examiners are better than others. At this. Some can actuate, forget the setting, the stilted artifice, and speak as from the heart. So that with these, briefly, the recording techs can forget the job’s sheer tedium, the contrivance, the stiffness of standing still at machines that could run on their own. The techs are, in other words, engaged by the better ones; attention requires no effort. But only some are better… and the question at the monitor is why, and what it means, and whether what it means will matter, in terms of results, when the whole thing is given to Stecyk to track down the line.
Videotape File 047804(r)
© 1984, Internal Revenue Service
Used by Permission
945645233
‘It’s a tough job. People think deskwork, pushing papers, how hard can it be. Government work, the job security, pushing papers along. They don’t get it why it’s hard. I’ve been here now three years. That’s twelve quarters. All my reviews have been good. I won’t be doing rotes forever, trust me. Some of the fellows in our group are fifty, sixty. They’ve been doing rote exams over thirty years. Thirty years of looking at forms, crosschecking forms, filling out the same memos on the same forms. There’s something in some of their eyes. I don’t know how to explain it. My grandparents’ apartment building had a boiler man, a janitor. This was up near Milwaukee. Coal heat, this old fellow fed the coal furnace every couple hours. He’d been there forever; he was almost blind from looking into the mouth of that furnace. His eyes were… The older ones here are like that; their eyes are almost like that.’
968223861
‘Three or four years ago, the new president, the current one, got elected into office on the promise of big defense spending and a massive tax cut. This is known. The idea was that the tax cut would stimulate economic growth. I’m not certain how this was supposed to work — a lot of the, like, upper policy ideas didn’t reach us directly, they just trickled down to us through administrative changes in the Service. The way you know the sun’s moved because now the shadows in your room are different. You know what I’m saying.’
Q.
‘All of a sudden there were all these reorganizations, sometimes one right after the other, and repostings. Some of us stopped even unpacking. This is where I’ve been the longest now. I had no background in exams. I came out of Service Centers. I got reposted here from 029, the Northeast Service Center, Utica. New York, but upstate, in the third quarter, ’82. Upstate New York is beautiful, but the Utica Center had a lot of problems. At Utica I was in general data processing; I was more like a troubleshooter. Before that I was at Service Center substation 0127, Hanover NH — I was in payment processing, then refund processing. The Northeast districts were all in octal code and the forms with sprocket holes that they hired Vietnamese girls to sit there and tear off. Hanover had a lot of refugees. It was eight, nine years ago, but a whole different era. This here is a much more complex organization.’
Q.
‘I’m single, and single men are the ones in the Service that get reposted the most. Any repost is a hassle for Personnel; reposting a family is worse. Plus you have to offer incentives for people with families to move, it’s a Treasury reg. Regulation. If you’re single, though, you stop even unpacking.
‘It’s hard to meet women in the Service. It’s not the most popular. There’s a joke; can I tell it?’
Q.
‘You meet a woman you like at, like, a party. She goes, what do you do. You go, I’m in finance. She goes, what kind. You go, sort of a type of accounting, it’s a long story. She says, oh, who for. You go, the government. She goes, city, state? You go, federal. She goes, oh, what branch. You go, US Treasury. On it goes, narrowing down. At some point she figures it out, what you’re dancing around, and she’s gone.’