Government – any government, mind you – runs on paper. Not thousands of documents. Not tens of thousands. Not hundreds of thousands. Millions of documents. Possibly billions by this point.

If you ever wondered why it takes government so freakin’ long to modernize, it’s because of the absolutely colossal amount of paper that needs to be converted over.

You would think governments would keep their paperwork all in order. Nope. The reason for that is that no two offices organize paperwork the same way. Oh sure, they try to centralize around something that’s supposed to work for every branch, but it never does.

To put this in perspective, imagine for a moment if you had one ton of sand, and were asked to organize every grain of sand by size, shape and weight. And then after that organize them by color. That’s a small glimpse into what dealing with the mountains of government paperwork is like.

The FBI, finally, after all this time, is going digital. It took 12 years, hundreds of millions of dollars and so many delays that it’s not even funny, but they’re finally going to break away from the paper. And I give credit to the FBI where its due, as the new Sentinel system is not something where they’re going to use that in concert with the old paper system. They’re biting the bullet, shutting down the paper system and going for it in the digital world.

What’s the biggest problem with the new system? Getting agents to actually use the thing.

And you thought you had it bad when the office switched over the email system.

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