I ran across this article on Sunday, and found it fascinating.

It’s about the federal government’s retirement filing facility, which is housed in an old limestone mine in a small town in Pennsylvania. Yes, federal employees’ retirements are actually processed and stored in a big limestone cave. By hand! Pretty cool, right?

I mean, pretty cool in an “isn’t that crazy” way, not in a “we’re living in the future” way.

A few parts of the story reminded me of California. One is how the federal government has tried a few times to computerize the process, but all the attempts failed. California’s Oracle scandal was the most famous of the state’s technology failures, but not the only one. The state’s paycheck system is still being run on a system designed and implemented before the era of personal computers, and attempts to upgrade it are almost ten years old and not going well.