George just e-mailed me this video of the Transit OmniForm Program. OMFG. This looks like a video from the future. But George said it's really from 1993.
I asked James, my IT guy, if we could implement a similar system. He said they've been working on it ever since MISD sent a bunch of guys to that district after the merge and confiscated all the computers. But James was being suspiciously vague, so I told him to pull all the files on the project and send them to my office.
Well, there wasn't much in the file. Here's the "project log" as I found it in the file:
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April 2, 1995: Took the MISD "special projects" team down to District 2 to impound all the Transit Police computer systems. We brought them a couple of IBM Selectric typewriters and TELEX terminals and welcomed them heartily to the NYPD. I also called the paperwork printing guys to have them bring over a couple of truckloads of advanced NYPD forms.
April 3, 1995: Started looking into how these Transit guys set up this advanced computer system.
April 4, 1995: Horribly confused. This stuff isn't a TELEX based command line system. I don't understand it.
April 5, 1995: Took an E-Day for psychological reasons.
April 6, 1995: Ordered Tim to get a cart and roll all the Transit computers into a basement storage area. We'll look into this stuff later. Right now we need to fix our TELEX mainframe server. It broke down again and we've already had to assign 496 MISD Log #'s in the past half hour alone. Apparently a bunch of precinct C.O.'s are trying to get ready for CompStat and can't pull up any of their statistics on the computers.
January 10, 2005: Somebody was asking about a Transit OmniForm Program. This entry is here only to document (CYA, of course) that I wasn't in charge in 1996 and I have no idea where the hell these guys put the Transit computers.
March 12, 2006 - morning: Finally relocated the old Transit computers. I had Dave boot up the systems. We spent the day pouring over the code.
March 12, 2006 - evening: We don't understand this stuff. Property vouchering on the computer? WTF? Vouchers are prepared on typewriters. WTF is this confusing crap. Ordered Dave to pack this junk back up again and wheel it back into the basement.
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Well, apparently our MISD guys can't figure this Transit OmniForm stuff out. I asked James what the problem is. He said "well, boss, I don't really see a reason to rock the boat here." He makes a good point. We have a pretty great system already that works. So it involves a mountain of paperwork and typewriters. Who cares.
I dumped the file in the shredder. We don't need this Transit junk.
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