The Morning File likes to see itself as a synergist, a one-step-ahead operator who reads the entire playing field. It's the kind of omniscient entity that can see someone with a need over here, another with an opportunity over there, and then bring them together in a win-win situation for everyone around.

Just as a for instance, we're the ones who a long time ago, way before anyone else was thinking of it, saw Paris Hilton and a drug supplier as being a natural fit. We just didn't mention it because that's not the kind of connecting we arrange.

But the MF brain awakened from its midweek slumber when reading in one day's newspaper that Allegheny County Council members want to put jail inmates to work -- and in the next day's paper that a new private transportation service will provide a designated driver for individuals or groups that want to go somewhere and get smashed.

What a potential match! Let's put our prisoners in the driver's seat.

What more constructive work could an inmate be permitted to do than ridding the late-night streets of drunken menaces -- or at least of drunken menaces behind the wheel?

The inmates apparently are paid no more than 40 cents an hour, enabling the county to arrange a dirt-cheap contract with the company, BeMyDD (Be My Designated Driver), so that this nobly intentioned private entrepreneur is assured a comfortable profit while doing the public some good.

The prisoners themselves would presumably far prefer driving around bar-hoppers to picking up litter, cutting grass or other menial tasks that are the more traditional alternatives. The chauffeuring of hardcore partiers would also prepare them for a return to the general populace by giving them valuable experience in socializing with Steelers, off-duty police officers, suburban councilmen, off-duty firefighters and many others who would benefit from a sober driver.

We'll leave it to county officials to fine-tune the details, such as how tightly to supervise the jail's DUI offenders when renting them out for the job. We're just the idea people. But while we're on the subject, these seem like other good ways to put inmates to work:

• When highway detours and lane restrictions are set up without any apparent construction activity taking place, have the inmates sit atop a few paving machines or man other equipment as props, just so everyone driving by feels better about it.

• Now that the new school year is starting, search every school bus after it completes its dropoffs, to avoid the annual news drama about some sleeping child who was left behind.

• Round up all of those loose bears that have been sighted around Western Pennsylvania this summer.

• Start up a valet parking service for Downtown commuters, driving their vehicles to low-cost, distant parking lots for them in the morning and shuttling the cars back to them at the end of their workday.

• Stack the house and create an angry-looking crowd at public meetings of hospital officials looking to shut down medical centers still viewed as necessities within their communities.

• Walk the Cultural District en masse on weekday evenings to give it that busy, buzzing feeling it should have every night.

• Start putting snow tires and chains on Pittsburgh's emergency vehicles to make sure they'll actually work when the inevitable blizzard hits a few months from now.

• Provide whatever manual labor is needed to get the Point State Park fountain working again, and offer up some cheap workers to finish the front façade of the Hilton while they're at it.

• The same inmates who will be nighttime designated drivers can alternate working day shifts as jitney drivers for all of the Port Authority riders who lose their regular routes in January.

• Pitch in relief for the Pirates.

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.