Going to Pieces in Boise

Each morning in Boise, Idaho, as many as 50 temporary employees of the First Security Bank enter a suite of six rooms and seat themselves at tables topped with small piles of thin strips of paper. They delicately sift and poke through the piles, plucking out individual strips and pasting them on pieces of cardboard. Nobody turns on the air conditioners; the breeze might scatter the strips. The workers labor intently for six hours daily through the heat and tedium, picking and pasting like finalists in a jigsaw puzzle Olympics.

Three weeks ago, the bank's janitor accidentally put a box of 8,000 checks worth about $840,000 on a table reserved for trash. The operator of the paper shredder, which disposes of confidential material, dutifully dumped the contents into his machine. Next morning, after a frenzied search, Supervisor Madeline Roper found the shredded checks in a garbage can outside the bank. "I wanted to cry," she says. Most of the checks had been cashed at the bank and were awaiting shipment to a clearinghouse. Their loss posed the possibility of a bookkeeping nightmare because most of them were still unrecorded. The bankers could not be sure who paid what to whom.

The only way out of the mess, decided Bank President Ralph Comstock Jr., was to reconstruct each check, shred by quarter-inch shred. So the workers began their chore, segregating the slices by color, length, width, signatures and amounts, then matching and pasting the checks together one by painstaking one. More than 2,000 checks worth about $300,000 have been reassembled. To speed things up the bank is now planning to spread the work into two shifts. Even so, it will be weeks before the job is finally completed.

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