NYPD officers are fed up! Their typewriters are broken down relics from a previous age, making police work more difficult, stressful and demoralizing. To remedy this, the city is spending close to a million dollars. On new typewriters.

It's easy to see what happened here: faced with a failing fleet of typewriters—used for property and evidence vouchers, and little else—the NYPD could either upgrade and computerize their entire system, possibly saving time, money and morale in the long run, or just fix and replace their existing equipment. For a variety of plausible and sympathetic reasons—upfront cost, time, lack of cooperation from the government, etc—they chose the latter route.

But don't let that tarnish the glorious absurdity of the situation for you. This a 21st-century big city police force, nearly all of whom own personal computers, that spends—and will continue to spend—its days slaving away in front of machines that the rest of the modern world only waxes nostalgic about. [NYP via Yahoo via Reddit]

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