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Glitch hampers job seeker

Date of police arrest switched by computer

By Al Andry, Post staff reporter

William Henry Brundage believes a bizarre problem - part Y2K glitch, part data entry error - will be solved today and he'll have a good chance of getting that $12-an-hour job at the U.S. post office that he needs so badly.

The Roselawn man, who was on kidney dialysis for five years and unable to work, had a kidney transplant June 2 and his health quickly improved enough that he could start seeking work.

But his quest for a post office job, as a mail handler or clerk, left him trying to clear up a police record from long ago that resurfaced.

The first problem was this: 30 years ago, Brundage, who is now 48, was charged with carrying a concealed weapon and breaking and entering. When he went for an interview for the post office job on Oct. 15, he and the post office

interviewer, Lisa Butts, discovered that records show a disposition date for the 30-year-old charges of Jan. 1, 2000 - meaning that the charges are allegedly still pending.

Given that, the post office interviewer delayed a decision on the job and told Brudange that she had to verify that a mistake was made on the date.

''I need that job,'' he said. ''I have no income. Even the approximately $400 a month I get from Social Security is not enough.'' And those Social Security disability benefits will cease within the next two months.

So he went to the Hamilton County Clerk of Court's office to try to get the matter straightened out. Then to the police identification bureau. Then he was bounced back and forth between the two.

''They told me that it was a Y2K problem and that it would be fixed the next day. It was not fixed the next day,'' he said.

Hamilton County Clerk of Courts Jim Cissell got involved early Thursday.

Although it was Veterans Day - and a holiday, Cissell managed to come up with an explanation and he thinks he has the problem fixed.

''I'm told that when the Cincinnati Police Division and the Regional Crime Information Computer converted their data in the early '70s from one computer system to another, there was no disposition date on many cases. So they decided to fill in the date of 1/1/00,'' Cissell said.

''We can't fix the data. It's not our date to fix,'' he said.

A second part of the problem, he said, is that the clerk's office in recent years found that the dates in the records of 37,000 cases in the clerk's office and the police department did not match.

''We've managed to knock that down to 6,000,'' Cissell said.

Brundage will go to the police identification bureau today where he hopes he will get his corrected records.

If not, he has Cissell's phone number.

Cissell has promised to personally take care of the mess.

Publication date: 11-12-

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), November 12, 1999