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5100 Buford Hwy - NT perhaps

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    5100 Buford Hwy - NT perhaps

    As a young man I took a job with Decatur City Schools in DeKalb Co. Georgia. I moved into a one-room apartment in Chamblee, GA just around the corner from 5100 Buford Hwy.

    5100 Buford Hwy in Chamblee was, of course, the huge regional IRS service center. In those days, your Service Center handled EVERYTHING and you didn't have specialty offices with a dozen different addresses to send your stuff to. Chamblee, GA was the address for 5-6 different states and in the winter they would hire hundreds of temporary workers to keypunch in paper returns in those days before e-filing. To myself, the thing was like a megacenter - a sort of "mission control" for the entire SouthEast. The facility was longer than a city block and wide, too.

    In years to follow, I settled in my native Tennessee and we were asked to send our tax returns to Memphis service center, then to Ogden Utah, and then to Austin, TX. Not long ago I had the chance to visit Atlanta and the old apartment complex I lived in. Still there, but the residents are from various nationalitiies - Chinese, Mexican, Vietnamese, whatever. I decided to turn the corner on Buford Highway to look at the service center.

    The ghost of the large building was still around, but had been converted to a flea market. Earth-moving equipment was all around, as the old fence had been partially demolished. The space of several dozen acres is obviously on its way to becoming something else. The suburban town of Chamblee itself is becoming something else as well - at a minimum an international community. In addition, at 4:00 P.M. the traffic signals all over Chamblee were turned off in the middle of the rush hour, and the international drivers treated all intersections as if they were a four way stop. Maybe if someone reads this who is familiar with the NE Atlanta area, they can reflect more accurately on my information.

    Hard to feel the same nostalgia for the old Service Center as you do for an Antebellum Plantation being torn down, but I felt a twinge of something tugging at me - maybe just old age. Goes to show us that the only thing immune to change is change itself...
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