Back when I was in school—and I’m talking here primary and secondary school, not college—I and my fellow scholars were repeatedly warned that poor grades or excessive tardiness or the common practice of chewing gum in class were offences that would go on our “Permanent Records,” and that, once recorded, could never be erased and would follow us throughout our lives and make it difficult, if not impossible, to get decent jobs or bank loans to buy new or even used automobiles.
In short, blemishes on one’s Permanent Record were to be avoided at all costs. I imagined, at the time, that these documents were stored in yellow-brown manila file folders arranged alphabetically in dark green filing cabinets in the principal’s office and were promptly forwarded whenever an individual changed schools or moved to another town or even another state. Of course, when one grew up, these no doubt ever-fattening files would be delivered to any prospective employer, college or technical school admissions officer, or military recruiter without those individuals even having to request them.
When I had completed my schooling I don’t remember ever worrying much about where my Permanent Records were kept nor who had access to them. They were out there and there wasn’t anything I could do about them, now. For all I knew the whole Permanent Record thing might have ended at some time in the 1960s since the threat from teachers seems not to be a part of later generations’ collective consciousness. Be that as it may, I believe now that the Permanent Records for my generation were most likely kept in Washington, D.C., and were, in fact, the documents upon which the much-hated J. Edgar Hoover based his infamous files. And while I have today neither the patience nor the inclination to apply under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain what I imagine would turn out to be a thick and scurrilous copy of my own FBI File, I am of the opinion that all extant Permanent Records are now stored—like nuclear waste—in a huge bunker inside some mountain somewhere in Utah and that the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to those documents.
And so it is for this reason I am hereby confessing to every aberrant activity in which I can recall having engaged (and, yes, there are probably some that I have forgotten ), and making available for the first time to the general reading public, to the best of my recollection, my very own Permanent Record.
In short, blemishes on one’s Permanent Record were to be avoided at all costs. I imagined, at the time, that these documents were stored in yellow-brown manila file folders arranged alphabetically in dark green filing cabinets in the principal’s office and were promptly forwarded whenever an individual changed schools or moved to another town or even another state. Of course, when one grew up, these no doubt ever-fattening files would be delivered to any prospective employer, college or technical school admissions officer, or military recruiter without those individuals even having to request them.
When I had completed my schooling I don’t remember ever worrying much about where my Permanent Records were kept nor who had access to them. They were out there and there wasn’t anything I could do about them, now. For all I knew the whole Permanent Record thing might have ended at some time in the 1960s since the threat from teachers seems not to be a part of later generations’ collective consciousness. Be that as it may, I believe now that the Permanent Records for my generation were most likely kept in Washington, D.C., and were, in fact, the documents upon which the much-hated J. Edgar Hoover based his infamous files. And while I have today neither the patience nor the inclination to apply under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain what I imagine would turn out to be a thick and scurrilous copy of my own FBI File, I am of the opinion that all extant Permanent Records are now stored—like nuclear waste—in a huge bunker inside some mountain somewhere in Utah and that the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to those documents.
And so it is for this reason I am hereby confessing to every aberrant activity in which I can recall having engaged (and, yes, there are probably some that I have forgotten ), and making available for the first time to the general reading public, to the best of my recollection, my very own Permanent Record.
