Hired at the IRS at 16!

When I was only 16, I was blessed with an absolute godsend of a job.

Hanging in the counselors office at school was a flyer titled: STUDENTS! WORK SWINGS AT THE IRS- MAKE MONEY FOR COLLEGE!

Now, for me, the IRS was a boogeyman. Caped capital crusaders who swept in with their tweed suits and old-fashioned calculators, pushed their glasses back up their nose and said "I'm here to audit and chew bubblegum- And we aren't allowed to chew bubblegum"

And then they ruin your life.

But this job was much more prosaic. They were hiring seasonal workers to do the most smooth-brained job the Ogden, Utah filing center had to offer.

Extraction.

That's right! In 2005, so many people still mailed in their returns, that nearly an entire building the size of a Sam's Club was filled with rows upon rows of long tables, interspersed with sectioned workspaces. A warehouse full of rolling metal carts was packed with envelopes sent in by John. P. Taxpayer, usually including the paper return and a check for what was owed. There are only a handful of filing centers across the country. As you might imagine, there were hundreds of thousands of envelopes to open.

And so, they thought it might be a fine idea to hire a bunch of HIGH SCHOOL KIDS to manhandle (or kidhandle) your tax returns. Thus, after a fingerprinting and thorough interview, I was off to the races with my best friend, Matt.

The day consisted of taking a weird thing that looked like a credit card with a shielded blade on it and opening envelope after envelope, removing the documents, filing the checks in a bin which older employees picked up regularly, and shouting for them immediately if there was ever cash.

My favorite side-job was called CANDLING. And no, unfortunately it doesn't mean you got to set fire to anything. Rather, Candling was a long flat table with a semi-transparent plastic top that had a bright light underneath it. You pass already opened envelopes over the light and spot anything missed in the envelopes. The number of checks and things you would find during a shift of candling terrifies me as an adult.

Matt and i used our candling time to work up static from the plastic surface and shock each other, or touch the contacts on the light fixture to try and short it out. Good kids, really!

By far the most entertaining thing working at the ARKA building (The K was backwards on the sign, I never found out why) was a

CODE YELLOW.

Oh.MY.GOODNESS.

Code yellow was what you called when any kind of suspicious substance came out of an envelope. And it happened more than I care to admit. People would mail in everything from laundry detergent to urine and feces.

Trust me, you wanted it to be urine or feces.

Because if it was laundry detergent.... well...The below image sums it up pretty well..

Because, pop quiz! Can anyone tell me what terrifying substance people loved to send IRS employees in the mail?

Thats right!

ANTHRAX.

No. Not the heavy metal band. The substance that was nearly invariably fatal if you get too much of it in your system. And it looks disturbingly like laundry detergent.

Fortunately, I never got to see any white powder, but a lady next to me DID have a piss-soaked envelope once.

Anyway, surviving the perils of toxins and electrocution meant Matt and I got to go on a "Detail". That was code for "This department needs help and we don't need you". So we got to transfer to the fabled

MainBuilding.exe

The main building is where good little government drones go to full cremate their hopes and dreams of a job that's ANY fun! Yay! So kawaii!

NO.

Jokes aside, we were pretty jazzed. It meant we were trusted. We were on the up and up! Climbing the ladder! So we went and stamped documents for 6 weeks in the "Numbering" Department. A department whose sole purpose is preparing documents to be scanned in so they can live in the new-fangled digital world. No staples. No creases. No potty breaks.

Ok, the last one was a lie, it's the federal government. Not AMAZON.

No, the main building had a full service cafeteria with trees growing in it. Actual, live trees, bathed in sun though skylights. We had really made it. That is, until our detail was over. And they kicked us back to ARKA. One thing... a slight issue...

We returned to ARKA and they stared at us like we had 6 heads.

"We laid off the high school team."

Too many incidents. Apparently, the plan to axe the kiddos had been in the works for a long time. Only, Matt and I were forgotten as we were on detail.

Watching the bureaucratic ichor drain from the faces of the resilient little cogs of the high school team as they fired them must have been a real kick in the pants, but it was a lot harder to do to two plucky little lads like us, right to our faces.

And thus, I spent the next 4 years of my life back at the main building in numbering. In that time I wrote a threatening note warning my day-shift desk counterpart to "Not touch my desk fan or ill break your neck" (Smart!)

Oh. And I built a crossbow out of two rulers, rubber bands, and paper clips. It shot folded-paper projectiles at about 3400 m/s.

I found myself in a small, square room with one metal chair and a bright white light, faced with someone from TIGTA. For those following along at home, thats the "Treasury Inspector General Tax Administration". It was a very "Papers Please, Glory to Arstotzka! " moment in which they assessed whether I was a genuine threat, or just a moron.

I was escorted from the premises judged to be very much the latter.