When a baby chick hatches from the egg, the chick imprints on the first moving object that it sees. The chick believes the imprinted object to be its mother, even if that object is a human being. Imprinting stamps the mind of a bird with a lifelong image of itself, and that initial stamp is irreversible.

Farmers have long known about imprinting. In ancient China, farmers imprinted their newly hatched ducklings with a special stick. Whoever carried that stick could lead great flocks of ducks through the fields each day and back home again at night to their roosts.

In 1973, a scientist named Konrad Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for his ground-breaking research around imprinting. That was about the same time that many tax preparers were being imprinted with Lacerte. It was much like the debate between CCH and Prentice-Hall: The reference materials you started out using, were likely to be your favorites for the rest of your career. Likewise, Apple imprinted millions of K-12 students with their high-priced operating system, so Windows remains anathema to many of them.

I left IRS in 1978 and bought a tax practice. About the same time I bought my first Radio Shack computer. I wrote my own BASIC program for doing returns, and figured out how to print them using dot-matrix, continuous-feed paper and plastic transparencies with the forms printed on them. Some of the attachments had to be typed separately. I eventually gave in to commercial software, although paying for so many bells and whistles that I don’t need is still annoying.

Your story about shipping worksheets across the Bay, then having returns shipped back, reminded me of when 1040-ES payments from many states were mailed to a PO Box in San Francisco. The payments were actually processed by a private lockbox in Oakland, but IRS was worried that taxpayers would object to a mailing address for that city because there was no there, there. One day, the truck from San Francisco to Oakland fell off the bridge. There are still some ES payments at the bottom of the Bay.