Decommissioning
the Human Element

On the quiet removal of 14,000 clerks from Central Processing, and why nobody filed the paperwork to notice.

I spent two weeks last February in the basement of Building C, Central Processing, sorting through forty-seven filing cabinets that nobody had opened since 1979. The drawers were packed tight — manila folders compressed into solid blocks, their tab labels faded to illegibility. Somewhere inside was Form 1190-B, the reassignment order that removed fourteen thousand clerks from the payroll. Nobody I spoke to remembered authorizing it.

The Arithmetic of Absence

The official position, as stated in Internal Memorandum 84-3312, is that the clerks were "reallocated to district sub-offices." District sub-offices, when contacted by post, do not exist. The addresses on file correspond to parking structures, empty lots, and one poultry processing plant.