You got to admit, when you see this sort of post, you have to assume that somebody got something wrong here — that there's some bad information, a mistake or two mixed into this:
Federal employee retirements are processed using paper, by hand, in an old limestone mine in Pennsylvania. 700+ mine workers operate 230 feet underground to process ~10,000 applications per month, which are stored in manila envelopes and cardboard boxes. The retirement process takes multiple months.
But it's true! And in fact, this system — a cross between a Soviet-style nuclear bunker and an insurance administration office circa 1963 or so — is so well-known that the Washington Post reported on it more than a decade ago:
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.
They're literally doing the Indiana Jones meme — with federal records!
Asked about the system in 2014, then-OPM Director Katherine Archuleta told the Post: "I do not believe that the current level of service is acceptable."
Workers apparently disagreed:
In an interview inside the mine this month, another federal official called the operation "very successful."
The facility is owned by Iron Mountain, a global storage company whose other holdings — at the Pennsylvania facility and elsewhere — include U.S. records masters and the will of Princess Diana.
Here's a neat tour of the wider facility apart from just the government records:
A deep-underground storage facility for precious papers is cool. It doesn't make a lot of sense for government paper records that should obviously be digitized at this point.
If it wasn't fixed in the past decade, I doubt it'll be fixed in the next one — especially since it hasn't been fixed since the late 1970s:
"The need for automation was clear — in 1981," said James W. Morrison Jr., who oversaw the retirement-processing system under President Ronald Reagan. In a telephone interview this year, Morrison recalled his horror upon learning that the system was all run on paper: "After a year, I thought, ‘God, my reputation will be ruined if we don't fix this,' " he said.
Morrison was told the system still relies on paper files.
"Wow," he said.
Amazing.
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