Arlington

     If you can't motivate civil servants to do a good job in record keeping at Arlington National Cemetery, where can you?
    There's word now that some 6,600 graves were improperly marked.
    This isn't like mistakes in keeping track of the location of thousands of cars at a big auto dealership. The cars move around. The graves, not so much.
     Did the managers get bored and become cynical, despite being surrounded by such hallowed ground?
     The top two were forced to retire, and they're pointing fingers at their staff and poor technology.
      It was those little guys and those old computers.
     Let's see. I'm in charge of the most important cemetery for veterans in the nation, and I discover there is a mis-marked or lost grave. Then another. Do I raise the alarm? Do I write Congress warning that that new software mapping program is really needed because we don't know where a certain hero's body is?
     Or do we wait till there are thousands of them, and then only after the media (Salon and The Washington Post) discover it and blow the whistle.
     Reports The Washington Post:

With minimal oversight, cemetery officials awarded as much as $8 million in contracts to digitize burial records, according to the subcommittee report. The cemetery has little to show for the investment today, with most burial records still catalogued on notecards.

     May I make a suggestion? There's a certain company known for mapping our lives down to the grill in your backyard, a firm that has got pretty deep pockets and a sense of public service.

     Can Google not offer to straighten out the project and write a map program as a Public Service to the nation's war dead? Later, they can sell the program for a profit to other cemetaries.

     Suggestion , Part 2: when they die, bury the retired Arlington managers in unmarked graves somewhere in a VA cemetery somewhere in the world. Some world.