We have 309 electric typewriters

I was leafing through my special commissioner's copy of the NY Post this morning when I stumbled across this article.

"It's the age of high-tech, but the city has just issued a $982,269 contract for manual and electric typewriters and supplies such as typewriter ribbons."

"NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the department has 309 electric typewriters that are used by detective squads and in precinct complaint rooms."

I was munching on a bowl of corn flakes and literally spit milk all over my desk when I read this. I, of course, called up Paul to grill him about this. "Paul, you mean to tell me that we're seriously blowing over $900,000 on electric typewriters in the year 2008?" Paul started blathering out his usual public relations bovine excrement to try to justify this idiocy, so I just hung up. I wasn't about to waste 10 minutes of my life listening to Paul make up stupid excuses. Who am I, the press?

But what really got me was this:

"'The people who use typewriters use them for a special purpose, usually to fill out multipart forms,' explained Ed Michael, sales manager of Swintec Corp. of Moonachie, NJ, which has the five-year contract."

Yeah, Ed, that might have been a good explanation in freakin' 1960 when I was a still a cadet typing up "multipart forms" in the precinct offices. This is 2008. What is Mike, asleep at the wheel? Who the f#@$ in their right mind authorizes a budget that includes expenditures of nearly a million bucks to maintain TYPEWRITERS?

And I thought my legacy was going to be as the commissioner who modernized the police department and brought it into the 21st century. Good luck to myself with that one. It seems I can build all the real-time crime centers I want, it won't matter when Paul is having the press print stories about how we're using 300+ bloody typewriters. TYPEWRITERS. Dammit, and now I still have to clean up all that milk and bits of cereal I spilled all over my office because the department supposedly can't afford to hire cleaners who actually do any cleaning around here.