Slashdot Mirror
Why US Gov't Retirement Involves a Hole in the Ground Near Pittsburgh
Increasing automation worries some people as a danger to the livelihood of those who currently earn their livings at jobs that AI and robots (or just smarter software and more sophisticated technology generally) might be well-suited to, as the costs of the technology options drop. The Washington Post, though, features an eye-opening look at one workplace where automation certainly does not rule. It's "one of the weirdest workplaces in the U.S. government" — a subterranean office space in what was once a limestone mine, where 600 Office of Personnel Management employees process the retirement papers of other government employees. The Post article describes how this mostly-manual process works (and why it hasn't been changed much to take advantage of advancing technology), including with a video that might remind you of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. As the writer puts it,
"[T]hat 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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_Found_in_a_Bathtub
Of course! I know where I've seen this before.
"The X-Files" Season 3 Episode 2 "Paper Clip" /* insert witty comment about government secrecy and overreach */
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Mutants living below New New York? That is New Pittsburgh...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
The 1973 Fire, National Personnel Records Center
They are still recovering from that one.
Experts Recover Military Personnel Records 40 Years After Fire
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
My wife worked 30+ years for two different government agencies. Getting OPM to figure out her pension correctly was a nightmare.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
... about asses and holes in the ground.
Awesome cover story
This makes perfect sense. Who are people eligible for retiring? People who have worked for the government longer than 30 years (lesser time depending on age). Thus a lot of the records having to deal with these employees are on paper, because that was what was in use when they were hired.
So there are two options - spend a ton of money all at once and digitize everything, or simply process the old paper records only as needed when those long-term employees retire. The first option is very inefficient because a significant number of the records will not be needed by the Office of Personnel Management for individuals who have died or no longer work for the government.
As time goes on, more and more people retiring will have all digital records, and eventually the whole paper thing can go away. As the article quickly glosses over, only 15% of the cases require referencing the old paper records actually stored in the mine. And that number will constantly be dropping as those older employees retire.
So the current method is more cost effective and will naturally "go away" on its own after another decade or so.
Better known as 318230.
Does the video play for anyone (without Windows?) Won't load flash on Firefox, Chrome or Safari...
You presume too much to say this system is flawed. I trust the longevity of information on paper in a file cabinet stored in a subterranean cave far more than anything requiring electricity and magnets. Sure, you can save vastly more information more densely if you do it digitally. But I really don't have that many important bits to store. Just a few essential pieces of information will do just fine, thank you very much, and I'd rather keep them safely and well. And I don't much care about instantaneous retrieval either.
I submitted this to solyentnews.org yesterday. soylentnews is a fork of /. after the beta fiasco. If you hate dice, check it out. No ads or trackers either. My ghostery seems to look lost whenever I go there. :)
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
All DVD's of Brazil will have to be reclassified as nonfiction.
I am not shocked by the use of paper. It works, and it has a very good record on the data leak front.
However there is a problem with disaster recovery. What happens if paper burns or is flooded?
At least they didn't invest (aka: give a private company) billions to provide them with a completely useless computer system over the course of a decade that was totally outdated before the first dollar was spent, and wasn't compatible with anything.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
"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."
Stating the obvious, that's is chump change for the Government. Which isn't a bad thing, the article mentions other services money was tossed at to no avail.
get paid for doing it over and over.
Maybe it keeps a congress person in office.
It's really tough to have to figure out how to apply the complex set of laws covering retirement.
Plan a: Figure it out once, and code it up in S/W and then don't have to worry about it.
Plan b: Hire folks to figure it out for each case.
Plan c: Get the folks who did the Affordable helath care site to code it up and hope the paper records are still around to do plan b.
Well, at least they didn't do plan c.
And the folks have to show up to work to get their check.
And the system, for the most part, pays out retirement benefits.
I guess I should be thankful that at least a part of my tax dollars are actually sort of working?
Probably looks like this.
This clerical shop processes once in a lifetime events. Once the retirement data for an employee has been calculated, it goes into a pension payout system that automatically generates the checks every month. So it's not bad that it's mostly manual.
Some years ago, I got a look at the USAF Satellite Control Facility, which until the mid-1990s controlled all USAF satellites from a big blue building in Sunnyvale, CA. They "drove the bus" - handled orbital insertion and adjustment, stabilized the satellite orientation, monitored solar panels and batteries, and handled operational problems. (Payloads, such as cameras, radars, and such were controlled elsewhere by the owning agency over separate data links. Very USAF.) The systems used were so antiquated that one was a custom-built emulator for a tube computer. For each satellite pass, physical patchcords had to be set up to interconnect three computers (one to buffer data, one to decode it, and one to compute orbital mechanics) to process the data for the pass. The consoles looked and worked exactly like the 1960s ones from the Apollo program. The operation took about 600 people to run.
Yet they never lost a satellite through an error made at that faciilty. The USSR has lost satellites through such errors. NASA has. COMSAT has. But not all those old guys in Sunnyvale.
There were two attempts to modernize the facility; one using mainframes, and one using VAX computers. Both failed. It was finally replaced, cautiously, with a new facility at Falcon AFB. I have no idea what they're using. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the old software for some of the older satellites is still running in emulation.
How may we meet your filing needs?
I mean paper doesn't have to be inefficient, in fact it rarely is since paper based workflows are often optimized. Everybody working with paper understands the process and can therefore come up with ways to optimize it.
I once worked at a hospital which had paper files. It makes sense since the documents in there can be in a lot of different types. The process of dealing with it was rather efficient on the paper side, you had some numbers and got the file with that number from a cabinet. The actual bottleneck was the computer based indexing system. We had something similar to E-Mail called "Outlook/Exchange". We ended up printing out those pseudo E-Mails, looking up each number individually in the indexing system, and writing the number of the file next to it. There was no way of sorting the entries to be able to reach them efficiently, nor was the system well designed. (it had SQL injection bugs!)
This is just one example of how badly designed computer based workflows can be.
Then there is the other point of governments being supposedly less efficient than companies. I have no idea where that idea comes from. I have 2 retirement funds, one run by a private company, the other one run by the government. While the government one manages to pay out millions of pensions every month and flawlessly adapts to any changes in my life, the private one can't even get a simple address change right, twice in a row!
Why should companies change? Companies mainly act to self-preserve. Any change is not just constructive, but also destructive. For a company to change it would need to have a vital reason, without that reason it cannot change.
Some people claim that there is the magic hand of the market which will somehow fix the problem though something called "competition". Those people go on citing exotic areas where their dogma actually worked and there was competition. However look around you. Go to an electronics store with a list of brands that come from the same manufacturer and then look at how many different prices exactly the same product gets sold. If there was competition, everyone would buy the cheapest of the otherwise identical products. There is no competition on many markets.
The reason this relic still exists is likely explained at 0:41 into the video where you can see the words "Iron Mountain" above the entrance. What can be processed with a few low power computers in a rack for a few hundred dollars a year is generating a mountain of cash for Iron Mountain in rental and consulting "fees".
Follow the money.
your eating ass boys.....
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
Of course, that goes for most indoor workers in general, from lack of direct sunlight. But it might be a bit more extreme for those working underground, who might be less likely to take lunch breaks up in the sunlight.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is merely a branch of L-space. If you encounter an ape, please pass him my greetings and give him a banana.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Just keep paying them their salary for life and beyond. It's cheaper that way.
Wow. What was it like before you implemented SAP?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I retired from the Federal Government at the end of 2006. I never had any problems getting the information I needed about my upcoming retirement and the money started coming in right on time. Given all the failed modernization efforts I witnessed during my government career, I would hope they get a new system up and running before they do anything to the current one.
Why US Gov't Retirement Involves a Hole in the Ground Near Pittsburgh
My first thought was that this was related to Centralia somehow...
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Nothing nefarious. Just a record repository. She hated it. She worked there about 3 years and finally wrangled a transfer to another government job in a real building.
I think someone would have noticed this in miners long ago if there was a serious issue. I've personally spent the majority of my 38 year career working away from sunlight. The only side effect being that I have trouble seeing myself in the mirror, and a couple of pointy teeth.
Just another day in Paradise
Do they have a 27B Stroke 6?
Don't let government employees retire. Problem solved.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
US government agencies are too conservative to increase their efficiency, while conservatives are lambasting US government agencies' inefficiency...
Disclaimer: don't flame me bro, just playin' with words.
I get the idea of keeping records in a mine. Mines are great places. There are just a lot of things in the article that don't make any sense to me. Let me stick to the sob story of what a bad work environment it is...
Just like when I worked at a large electronics firm in Illinois. In the winter I'd go in before the sun was up, be in a sea of cubicles in an interior room until evening, leave after the sun went down. There are lots of jobs where you're indoors all day with no windows.
It doesn't say anything about going outside for lunch or breaks. Are the employees locked in or something? I've been in mines, I can believe that the ride up and down the elevator might take more than the time allotted for lunch. Then again, it's "230 feet below the surface". That's about 23 stories. Lots of office buildings are taller than that, and people manage to get up and down without undue stress.
They have these new things now, called microwave ovens. You don't have to stoke the ol' Franklin stove anymore to heat your food. I have never worked in a place which had flame-cooked food. Even the places with cafeterias used electric heat. At least this place has pizza delivery and a food truck. Lots of people brown-bag it every day around here. Maybe these paper-mine workers should consider it.
And if the food prospects are really so bad I see a great private-sector opportunity for some other food delivery service. Jimmy John, you're up!
It's still a major WTF that the whole thing is still literally shuffling paper around, but the article loses all credibility for me when they try to make it sound like hell on earth for the workers.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.