Throwing Money In A Bureaucracy Rat Hole

 

An aerial view of the parking lots and mine entrance

Actually, an old mine:

This is one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government — both for where it is and for what it does.
Here, inside the caverns of an old Pennsylvania limestone mine, there are 600 employees of the Office of Personnel Management. Their task is nothing top-secret. It is to process the retirement papers of the government’s own workers.
But that system has a spectacular flaw. It still must be done entirely by hand, and almost entirely on paper.
The employees here pass thousands of case files from cavern to cavern and then key in retirees’ personal data, one line at a time. They work underground not for secrecy but for space. The old mine’s tunnels have room for more than 28,000 file cabinets of paper records.
This odd place is an example of how hard it is to get a time-wasting bug out of a big bureaucratic system....
Held up by all that paper, work in the mine runs as slowly now as it did in 1977.
During the past 30 years, administrations have spent more than $100 million trying to automate the old-fashioned process in the mine and make it run at the speed of computers.
They couldn’t.
So now the mine continues to run at the speed of human fingers and feet. That failure imposes costs on federal retirees, who have to wait months for their full benefit checks. And it has imposed costs on the taxpayer: The Obama administration has now made the mine run faster, but mainly by paying for more fingers and feet....
But why is it in a cave at all?
The answer to that question is that, back in 1958, the U.S. government was in the market for storage space. It needed 30,000 square feet to hold personnel files that were being relocated from a building in Washington. Officials looked at buildings in Richmond, Va., and Syracuse, N.Y., before choosing this place, an underground complex where 1,000 workers had once cut limestone to feed the steel mills.
A private company had turned the place into an enormous safe-deposit box: safe from the weather and the Soviets, kept naturally cool as a cave. Today, the complex is owned by the company Iron Mountain, which leases out other caverns to store old Hollywood movie reels and photo archives.

That just seems crazy, but then there's this:

“On a daily basis, we would get from five to 50 e-mails, asking everybody to take time out of their day to search their desks for case files,” the former worker said. That worker said the experience of hunting down lost paperwork and lost files inside an underground cavern had been bad enough to force a career change.
The worker’s new job: setting off explosives.
“I’m handling live ordnance on a daily basis, just to get out of there,” said the worker, whose company blasts holes in the ground for oil and gas wells. “One of the five worst jobs in the world was a great alternative to being down there.”

Actually, when I started my current job, all our orders were paper files, and we usually got 1 to 5 emails a day asking people to check their desks for files. When we had a lean event on the order processing system, electronic files were the thing I pushed for. Even with some bugs, it is a hell of a lot better. And that was in the efficient private sector.  I probably wouldn't leave this job to work with explosives, but some days I feel like I should.