Un-frickin-believable

[imwalde]

A New York Times editorial today was talking about campaign finance reform and how the fact that the House has to post all their financial records on the internet has helped, but the Senate does not post them directly, as it turns out.

Get this:

Consider the current Senate paper snooze. Instead of quickly downloading their campaign financing data directly to the Federal Election Commission, like everybody else, senators print out their records on paper and snail-mail them to the Senate secretary. These pages have to be scanned into digital images that are then e-mailed to the election commission, where — wait now — they have to be printed and collated. This paper treadmill — perhaps 10,000 pages — is next sent to a private contractor to be tediously typed at a cost of $250,000 back into a computer, of all things. From there, the information is e-mailed back to the election commission for, yes, posting on the Internet.

I...I almost have to admire that -- it's brilliant. Joseph Heller could not have come up with anything better. He's smiling down from heaven. Unless of course, he is not dead. No idea, actually.

Comments

[oh-no-the-snake.livejournal.com]

I came across something similarly impressive at amazon when I was trying to track down the ultimate source of a certain piece of data about warehouse performance - I don't remember the details, but it was something like data from warehouse databases was collected by someone at headquarters, and copied by hand into an excel spreadsheet, which was emailed back to the warehouses, so that they could copy it by hand back into a different part of the database - I don't think I'm remembering it quite right, but it definitely involved databases, Excel, emailing, and hand-copying for data to end up where it started. Every week.

[imwalde.livejournal.com]

It's the printout that gets rescanned only to get reprinted out only to be RETYPED AT A COST OF $250, 000 that gets me!

And I'm not supershocked about the government, but that Amazon is guilty of something similar is a little more surprising. The government does not strive to be a model of efficiency, after all.