I’ve not been able to access my work voicemail for the past month. I moved offices, but took my number with me. When I tried to access my voicemail, I kept getting a “number not recognized” message. Today, they finally told me that I had to dial a new and different number for voicemail access, different, that is, from the standard variation on the number people call to speak to me (or to _leave_ the voicemail). So I dial the new code. There’s a a month-old message from the voicemail people: “thanks for your inquiry about not being able to access your voicemail. You can’t access it on the old number, you’ll need to dial XXXX instead.”
{ 39 comments }
christian h. 11.06.08 at 4:29 pm
What was that thing on DOS… “Keyboard error. Press F1 to resume”?
c.l. ball 11.06.08 at 4:51 pm
Was it an Audix voicemail system?
salient 11.06.08 at 4:53 pm
thanks for your inquiry about not being able to access your voicemail. You can’t access it on the old number, you’ll need to dial XXXX instead.â€
Not to mention how hard it is to find that pesky ‘ten’ key, or their odd predilection for Roman numerals. :-)
noen 11.06.08 at 5:08 pm
So is this because they hire stupid people or because the organization makes them do stupid things?
Sebastian 11.06.08 at 5:38 pm
If your email is down, please respond to this email…
roac 11.06.08 at 5:45 pm
If you can’t read this card, please tell a flight attendant.
rea 11.06.08 at 5:58 pm
“If you dont’ answer the question, young man, we’re going to have to gag you.”
“What question?”
“GAG HIM!”
[An obscure literary reference]
Righteous Bubba 11.06.08 at 6:02 pm
Has nobody here had fun at the expense of their co-workers? Or followed through with an idiotic instruction just to watch it crash and burn? Or, heaven forbid, proposed something stupid to see if anyone would bite?
I guess the internet is better for killing time.
Steve LaBonne 11.06.08 at 6:03 pm
Raise your hand if you can’t hear me.
Eszter Hargittai 11.06.08 at 6:33 pm
Oy.
#6 above reminds me of this post.
Eudaimonia 11.06.08 at 7:01 pm
If there are any potential jurors who don’t understand english, please follow this court officer…
typewritten 11.06.08 at 10:27 pm
Gosh! That’s absolutely the essence of our time!
Ginger Yellow 11.06.08 at 11:52 pm
I’m sure everyone here is familiar with End User License Agreements that assume your consent before you have a chance to read them., for example inside a sealed box.
HH 11.07.08 at 12:29 am
There is something more disturbing at work in these anecdotes of end-user technology frustration. Information technology products are designed to “export” certain costs to the consumer, typically labor-intensive setup, configuration, and troubleshooting costs. This practice results in a technological fallacy of composition, in which the aggregate burden of configuring, and managing a dozen digital “labor-saving” devices becomes oppressive to the unfortunate user of this stuff. What seems a reasonable burden to impose on the end-user by one developerin isolation becomes an onerous burden in aggregate.
It is becoming painfully obvious that the next generation of personal productivity software and hardware will have to be built around a diagnostic architecture that is completely missing from current products. Meanwhile, the usual suspects pretend that there is nothing wrong with the design of their products that calling the help desk (in India) won’t resolve.
Watson Aname 11.07.08 at 12:38 am
HH needs to buy a mac.
More seriously, people are working on this stuff, but consumers are largely voting against it on cost (i.e. cheaper bit of kit plus help desk in India if you’re lucky).
HH 11.07.08 at 3:44 am
HH needs to buy a mac.
Ah, yes, we must not forget the Mac, which works flawlessly with your IPhone, Ibook, ICar, ITelevision, and IWashing Machine. It doesn’t require an entrepreneur with an upscale design fetish to implement a common diagnostic architecture. All it takes is awareness of the problem and shared effort aimed at a common purpose. It will be amusing to observe the impact of Google’s G1 open software platform on the mighty IPhone.
In the age of the Internet, ubiquity is victory. Expensive designer merchandise bearing the Apple logo will not bring Promethean light to the third world, nor will it rationalize the interaction of products from all providers.
Joel Turnipseed 11.07.08 at 4:10 am
Seriously, does Crooked Timber have the “I read way, way too much George Steiner in my youth” crowd covered or what? Now if only we could get audio, with the “Al Franken: He’ll Kill Your Puppies!” voice-over specialists reading the apocalyptic apothegms.
Meantime: This is very funny, Chris. However: having written a EULA or three, it’s highly unlikely that there are many (enforcable) EULA’s out there that are applicable before they’re accessible. Furthermore, in the vast majority of (marketable!) products, whatever work their makers are outsourcing to their consumers is far outweighed by their remaining utility–and the product would never be useful if the (entire) burden of implementation and support fell to the maker.
I’m not saying, “Hey, let’s design shitty software/electronics/whatever!” Just: it’s easy to slag on this stuff if you’ve never made it. As for Open Source, there are obvious successes (I’m a longtime devoted fan of Firefox and Thunderbird–though neither is perfect) but most of it is really only useful for techies–precisely because it’s so hard to do “whole product” development without serious cash flows/investments.
OK, back to laughing at the foibles of human invention…
Neil 11.07.08 at 4:56 am
Chris writes something about human stupidity. This reminds some commentators of licensing agreements. Then, in a master of overinterpretation, he is criticised for his attack in licensing agreements. Well, why not… Chris, will you or won’t you denounce licensing agreements?
Joel Turnipseed 11.07.08 at 5:57 am
Neil: I see… actually, I should have been clearer: “Chris = Funny; HH = breathlessly pedantic (even though it’s true: we could all do better); Ginger Yellow… I dunno: either misinformed or cherry-picking @ 13?”
So there: intentionality by the dots. I guess having spent the last dozen or so years working in software in one capacity or another just makes me twitchy when people bitch about software! ; )
[Though… if more people knew how hard engineering any kind of widespread human interaction is, we wouldn’t have had, say, Iraq! … and I say that understanding fully-well that there’s a tu qouque headed my way for various opinions I have about U.S. domestic politics.]
Neil 11.07.08 at 11:33 am
Today’s xkcd.com.
Lex 11.07.08 at 12:34 pm
Qouquing sounds painful, especially if there’s tu of you…
HH 11.07.08 at 1:15 pm
just makes me twitchy when people bitch about software!
Unfortunately, as any reader of Scott Adams knows, the professional integrity of software engineers is routinely overridden by the imperative of “good enough to ship,” and management demands for steady earnings growth. Windows Vista, the product of the most powerfully financed software juggernaut on Earth, shipped with flaws so significant that it is a subject of mockery in the marketplace.
No, Mr. Turnipseed, telling us that it is a hard job does not change the systemic problems of the software marketplace, which have resulted in a welter of under-performing, unreliable, and incompatible consumer software. What is missing is a holistic understanding of product utility, which moves beyond the feature bullet-point list to incorporate considerations of ease of installation, configuration, diagnostics, upgrading, and inter-product compatibility. Until holistic end-user utility becomes a prominent consideration in consumer software design, we will be stuck with mediocre products, no matter how hard you work.
Watson Aname 11.07.08 at 2:46 pm
What is missing is a holistic understanding of product utility, which moves beyond the feature bullet-point list to incorporate considerations of ease of installation, configuration, diagnostics, upgrading, and inter-product compatibility.
And yet you sneer at one of the only companies in the marketplace making a serious go of this. I was obviously joking about the mac thing, as you conveniently omitted quoting in your snarky response to it… But unlike most software companies they actually do think about all of these things pretty hard, with mixed results.
The mixed results are largely due to the far more fundamental (than the design focus you bring up) problems that the software industry faces. Namely, nobody anywhere knows how to build and manage large software systems reliably. We can just about manage it for smallish systems at great expense.
Watson Aname 11.07.08 at 2:54 pm
That last sentence was unclear, sorry. We can just about manage reliable smallish systems at great expense. Here I am thinking of embedded systems for medical controls, NASA missions, and the like. Larger systems typically aren’t reliable period, but can be made robust by redundancy and recovery strategies. Also, some become pretty reliable over time — about the same time they become unmaintainable (i.e. it works, don’t touch it). This is hardly a big win.
J Thomas 11.07.08 at 3:08 pm
Watson Aname, what you say has an obvious implication:
If you care whether your software works, don’t use a large software system.
Also, don’t run your application on a large operating system.
J Thomas 11.07.08 at 3:15 pm
It follows that if you use Microsoft Windows, you don’t really care whether your data survives or not. If you cared about reliability, you wouldn’t do that.
Lex 11.07.08 at 3:22 pm
Yes, well, not really caring about underlying risk has rather turned out to be an endemic problem lately, hasn’t it?
HH 11.07.08 at 4:11 pm
The mixed results are largely due to the far more fundamental (than the design focus you bring up) problems that the software industry faces. Namely, nobody anywhere knows how to build and manage large software systems reliably.
I disagree. A far more significant obstacle is the combat model of competition within the industry, which makes interoperability across commercial products of multiple vendors a low priority and results in finger-pointing as a primary vendor response. The EU had to bring tremendous pressure on Microsoft to ensure basic interoperability of third-party software with the MS server platforms. Microsoft delayed compliance by making the hilarious claim that they didn’t know how to document what was required.
The design difficulties in question are not insuperable. We are not talking about battle management of the interception of 1,000 ballistic missile warheads. What we need are industry-standard protocols for characterizing and resolving intra- and inter-application communication problems. The architectural challenge is analogous to what was done with plug-and-play intelligent recognition and installation of peripherals. A similar conversational protocol needs to evolve for inter-application communication within and across vendor product lines.
J Thomas 11.07.08 at 4:11 pm
Sure. So, like, say you’re an important administration figure, and your political enemies think that some of your saved email would put you behind bars if they could only get access to it. Even if what they’re looking for isn’t there, something really embarrassing is sure to be there once they look.
And then all of a sudden it turns out that there was a system error and the records were accidentally deleted. Your system administrators were using Windows so no one is surprised.
Reliability is sometimes a big liability. How much nicer to have a system that’s guaranteed to be unreliable, that you still don’t get blamed for using!
HH 11.07.08 at 4:24 pm
Your money in the bank is just bits in a file. Banks have learned how not to lose these bits. Highly reliable means of preserving Email bits in files have been in use for decades in thousands of organizations. The extensive “loss” of Bush administration emails was deliberate.
Watson Aname 11.07.08 at 4:59 pm
HH, I’m not saying the political and marketing problems aren’t real. I’m saying that nobody actually knows how to effectively do what you ask, even given the will (hence necessary but insufficient, as I said). You can disagree with that, I suppose, but basically all of the history of the software industry is against you. The typical outcome of a large software project is still a managed failure, even all these years after Fred Brooks pointed that out.
People often misunderstand how the robustness of systems like bank transactions is managed, and how poorly that scales to your desktop.
J Thomas 11.07.08 at 5:00 pm
HH, banks use basicly simple software. They started in mainframe days when memory limits put severe restrictions on how big software could reasonably get. They have made a serious effort to keep it simple.
If you absolutely have to get a complex system that works, your best chance is to evolve it from a simple system that works.
Of course the Bush stuff was deliberate, but they had a good alibi because they used Windows. Nobody could have expected it to keep their data. (If I’m wrong and they didn’t use Windows, what was their excuse?)
Watson Aname 11.07.08 at 5:06 pm
By the way, plug and play never worked very well, and was a lousy design from an end user point of view because it had two modes: work seamlessly or fail in obscure ways. Most people didn’t notice, because most people only used very common devices. It was for years an end-user design nightmare for anyone with less common needs. It’s still pretty bad, from what I hear.
HH 11.07.08 at 5:20 pm
By the way, plug and play never worked very well
I reference plug-and-play (AKA plug-and-pray) as an analog, because it establishes an interoperability solution at an architectural level, not just through ad hoc measures. Plug-and-play is indisputably here to stay, because it puts more intelligence into the interface. It will improve steadily, and nobody seriously considers abandoning the approach of intelligent, dynamic recognition and configuration of peripherals when attached to a computer.
Just as lavish processing resources are now devoted to relatively trivial refinements of interface display (e.g., translucent windows), increasing computing resources will be devoted to intelligent negotiation of interfaces between (imperfectly) compatible software from multiple vendors. The main obstacle to moving in this direction is the lack of openness in the combat model of competition in the proprietary software industry. Government technology policy has an important role to play in this regard. Everyone benefits when our technology tools work better together.
J Thomas 11.07.08 at 5:54 pm
Open Firmware was technically a far better solution than PnP, but it failed because MS didn’t support it. A coalition among Sun, Apple and IBM, they didn’t gain enough from interoperability among themselves and MS-compatible components were cheaper by volume.
So, standards are good but you can’t expect to get useful standards by a competitive market process. How can you hope to develop workable interoperability standards? The vendors who would abide by them will try to sabotage them in committee for the reasons HH mentions. No one else has sufficient market share to call the shots, and when they do they try to exclude the competition rather than regulate interfaces to it.
Maybe the best chance for effective standards comes when some very-different competitive alternative might cause the whole set of competitors to lose out, and they all think they have a better chance with interoperability than without.
The internet is the most complex system I’ve seen in use. Sometimes a server doesn’t like my ISP and refuses to connect with me. Sometimes it’s a subscription firewall, or a payment firewall. Sometimes links are just dead. But usually what happens on the other end of the connection won’t crash my computer, or even my browser. The internet very largely works in failure mode, but it works often enough that we like it anyway.
Watson Aname 11.07.08 at 6:11 pm
Who said “The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from” ?
HH 11.07.08 at 6:21 pm
How can you hope to develop workable interoperability standards?
Federal IT standards (AKA, Obamasoft) mandated to address economic emergency, energy crisis, medical system reform, or any other good excuse.
J Thomas 11.07.08 at 10:53 pm
“How can you hope to develop workable interoperability standards?”
Federal IT standards (AKA, Obamasoft)….
No.
Don’t go there. Just don’t go there.
Trust me on this. That is not going to get the interoperability standards you want.
David 11.08.08 at 2:50 am
Plug and play has always worked, by and large, on the Mac platform. Far fewer problems, with a much larger array of devices, than Windows. USB is still far too often problematic in XP and hopeless in 2000. Unless you mean something entirely different by plug and play.
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