Here’s a job I’d be willing to take on–on one condition

The other day, I heard that when the FBI takes into their possession your paper files, they include the contents of your shredder in their grab. And they have a process for reconstructing those documents. If you’re envisioning straight-arrow guys in suits sitting their piecing together shreds of paper, you’re likely imagining a scenario that’s so yesterday. Having googled ‘how to recover shredded paper files’, I learned that there’s software that can help with the job. You scan in all those pieces and, thanks to AI, you may be able to get them into some semblance of readability

Anyway, I’m guessing that the FBI has access to this software.

Not so the White House, it appears.

When it comes to putting together documents that are in bits and pieces, they have it done the old fashioned way: by hand.

They’re not, however, dealing with files that were shredded in an actual shredding machine. No, they’re piecing together documents that were shredded into bits and pieces the old fashioned way: by hand. And these documents were shredded into bits and pieces by the tiny HUGE hands of the man who currently occupies the Oval Office.

Seems that there’s been more to the president’s day-to-day than just tweeting and “Executive Time.” He’s spending some of his valuable time tearing up “documents he is legally required to preserve has concerned White House aides.”

Two of the fellows charged with reconstructing - records management analysts making over $60K a piece – were Solomon Lartey and Reginald Young. They used to do more high-level archiving work. But once Trump blew into town, Lartey and Young, along with a number of colleagues, were tasked with taping the president’s papers back together again. That is, until they were laid off this spring – no notice, just frog marched out the door with no explanation, other than that they “serve at the president’s pleasure.” And his nibs was no longer pleased. Or maybe they just needed to make room for some lower-end members of the kakistocracy and found all these career record managers in their way.

Or maybe it’s that the records management group decided to purchase the AI software and no longer needed actual record management analysts who are good a figuring out puzzles.

It’s not because Lartey and Young were leaking, by the way. Their story came out after the fact of their dismissals, and came about when they were being interviewed about what they felt to be their wrongful pink slips. When they were asked what their jobs entailed, they noted that their work had been somewhat downgraded from what it had been under previous administrations.

Armed with rolls of clear Scotch tape, Lartey and his colleagues would sift through large piles of shredded paper and put them back together, he said, “like a jigsaw puzzle.” Sometimes the papers would just be split down the middle, but other times they would be torn into pieces so small they looked like confetti.

It was a painstaking process that was the result of a clash between legal requirements to preserve White House records and President Donald Trump’s odd and enduring habit of ripping up papers when he’s done with them — what some people described as his unofficial “filing system.”

Under the Presidential Records Act, the White House must preserve all memos, letters, emails and papers that the president touches, sending them to the National Archives for safekeeping as historical records.

But White House aides realized early on that they were unable to stop Trump from ripping up paper after he was done with it and throwing it in the trash or on the floor, according to people familiar with the practice. Instead, they chose to clean it up for him, in order to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law. (Source: Politico)

Well, all thanks and praise to those White House aides who wanted “to make sure that the president wasn’t violating the law” in this case, but where are they when we really need them?

All this said – plus it being said that I would not want to touch anything that DJT had touched - I would probably be pretty good at the task of piecing together ripped up documents. As would my sisters.

We come by our logical minds and puzzle solving abilities naturally, as our mother was a big one for complex jigsaw puzzles and any sort of word puzzle – from regular old crossword puzzles to the tricky diagramless. My sisters and I are all crossworders, with Kath taking the cake for being able to do those British punning puzzles that I’m clueless with. My allegiance has mostly switched to Sudoku, but I still do an occasional crossword puzzle.

We also do jigsaw puzzles when we’re at Kath’s on the Cape. Here I believe Trish gets the “mother’s daughter” award. She’s both good and persistent.

So all three of us could be called upon, in case of a national emergency, to piece together the Trump confetti letters. But I think I speak for all three when I say that we’d only be willing to do so if the document in question were a confession or a resignation letter.