I showed up for a doctors appointment yesterday at a big HMO and the person behind the counter got a defeated look on her face when I told her my doctor's name. It seemed that Doctor Jane (not her real name) had quit the facility over six months ago, but someone had forgotten to take her name out of the system so appointments were still being booked with her. This answer was a ltitle strange. I mean if she had said, her last day was yesterday or even last week I could have believed it, but six months? Were they getting people showing up everyday for the last six months asking to see this doctor? I had only made the appointment two weeks earlier so it wasn't a left over appointment booked far in advance, and the big HMO was efficient enough to send me a reminder card about the appointment.
Sometimes it seems like people don't know how to intervene when technology isn't working.
When the system is so automated that the person who handles the appointments has to rely on other people to make changes to the system such as adding and removing data it becomes faulty.
I might have been far more frustrated, but thanks to technology, they were able to find another doctor in the same building who was willing to see within thirty minutes of my original appointment. And my old doctor only used paper and pencil with no reminder calls.
Technology going wrong is a favorite topic among science fiction writers. It seems that no matter how well a system is designed, the human factor is always going to cause problems.
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