I <3 The Sixteenth Amendment

I have so much to tell you my dears, but I am so completely, utterly exhausted. I started my IRS job today. My drive took 45 minutes, and I was going about 75 virtually the entire way because it was 6am. We have got to hurry up and move in the next six weeks before I have to start getting there at 9:30, because my commute would double, and that would be entirely unacceptable.

Here are some of the things I retained from my 8 hours of orientation:

• They have their own set of secret police, with guns and everything
• During Prohibition, the IRS was apparently the big anti-liquor enforcement agency
• We have to back our cars in to our parking spaces to cut down on how many children we might potentially run over
• Paper clips, rubber bands, and office chairs can, and in fact are very likely to kill us.
  
• We can't spend our break time looking up how much our exes and/or celebrities made last year or we will get fired
• When we are drinking and driving and get pulled over, we are not supposed to threaten to audit the cop to get out of the ticket because we can get fired for it, despite the fact that they then spent an inordinate amount of time telling anecdotes about just how effective a strategy it is
• Without ever mentioning it, they passed out half a photocopied newspaper article about a guy in San Diego who shot a bunch of people at his office
• You can eat lunch for $3.05 in the employee cafeteria
• Treasury employees are unionized

It's a lot more like working in a factory that I envisioned. The union people scared me to death. They demand $25 a month. That seems like an awful lot, considering what we're getting paid. It also sounded like the only real reason people join is peer pressure, since you don't get any particular additional benefit from being a member.

My favorite part was when the woman kept admonishing us to pahhhk our cahhhhs backwards. She must have said it twenty times.