NEW ORLEANS, LA – New Orleans City Hall activated its Office of Strategic Printing Operations Tuesday morning after learning Attorney General Liz Murrill’s legal team was expected to seek additional records related to the ongoing legal battle surrounding her indictment.
Within minutes, dozens of employees were seen hauling reams of paper toward humming printers before carrying freshly printed emails directly across the hallway to waiting industrial shredders.
“It’s an extremely sophisticated records management system,” said newly appointed Director of Printing & Shredding Operations Carl Dupré while overseeing what employees referred to as “The Toner Surge.” “The important thing is maintaining a smooth printer-to-shredder pipeline. Any slowdown creates unnecessary efficiency.”
Workers reportedly held strategy meetings throughout the morning to improve the efficiency of transporting paper from the printers to the shredders, eventually relocating one shredder directly beside the busiest copier to eliminate what officials called “wasted walking time.”
The sudden increase in printing activity forced City Hall to purchase every available toner cartridge within a 20-mile radius, while employees proudly celebrated converting more than 70,000 digital emails into several industrial bags of shredded paper before lunchtime.
The city’s IT department briefly attempted to explain that emails already exist in digital form, but the conversation was quickly interrupted by the unmistakable sound of another printer warming up.
When asked by reporters how printing and shredding the paper copies affected the original digital emails stored on the city’s servers, one employee briefly stopped feeding pages into the shredder, looked up with a puzzled expression, and replied, “The… what copy?”
The employee reportedly stood silently for several seconds before glancing at a nearby coworker and asking, “Y’all mean these things are still in the computer after you print them?”
Witnesses said shredding operations resumed immediately after another employee reassured the room that “it’s probably fine as long as we keep the printer running.”
