I may just leave things in this state and keep the current content archived.

This was an awfully attractive idea. When the fridge broke, or the 1967 MGB-GT, it was because some cotter pin or compressor or belt had failed. Life was a parade of blown gaskets, burnt electrical coils, snapped timing chains, and leaky valves. The promise of the new electronic age was that everything would just go on working, and we’d never repair anything again. Frequently, the marketing slogans would use the phrase “zero maintenance” or “nothing to fail!” as a sure closer.

The revolution is complete. Currently, everything has a microprocessor in it, and solid-state electronics are in all consumer products. Not only is my car run by circuit boards, but my refrigerator and my clock and the thermostat and almost everything else than ran on a spring or a valve or a chain drive is now completely electronic.

There are some results of this that we did not expect.

For one thing, everything is a computer and therefore unreliable. My phone “crashes”. My car is recalled because the logic in the processor is incorrect and the headlights turn off. The microwave shuts off because a bug in the embedded code does not allow the time to be 14;15. Complexity (the constant enemy of engineers) results in subtle problems that can’t be easily visualized. A task like shifting gears in a truck, which was once performed by metal plates controlled by wires pushed by a foot and a hand, is now carried out by possibly buggy computer code, so that second gear may not arrive because someone divided by zero.

And to make things even more trying, it’s very expensive. The promise of “no moving parts” was endless success. Since we haven’t achieved this, instead we have unrepairable mistakes. The car, which once could be fixed by a drunk with a ballpeen hammer in an hour, now requires an entire replacement of a $1000 “computer unit”. Airplanes with dangerously defective software require multi-million dollar recalls. And the oven that can’t handle time is not repairable; it must be tossed in the garbage and a new one bought.

The promise of digital technology followed an accelerated path to destruction similar to that of Communism. We were told that a new era dawned; that history had moved to a new state, free of the failures of the past; and that a near-perfect world had been inaugurated free of the outmoded mechanical chaos of the past.

Like workers freed of our chains, we would enjoy a trouble-free world of infallible digital machines that just worked, forever, without the need for metal-bending. Much like Communism, the no-moving-parts revolution was stained with human weakness. We can’t make perfect software, any more than we could make a perfect carburetor. The transistor revolution brought us errors at the speed of light and inexplicable mazes of complexity filled with terrifying minotaurs.

So while we rightly praise the digital revolution, with its instant banking and Internet communication and space-shrinking power, let’s not forget the humble moving part. With faulty humans we’ll always get faulty machines, but the clanky old cotter-pin and sawtooth machines can always be repaired with a bang and a curse and a twist, like the ‘67 MG. Like us, moving parts are forgiving.

I’ve been out of the loop with this stuff for a while.

I guess I can’t be cool now. I hate updating via the web interface; that’s one of the main reasons I haven’t updated this thing in a month. The only hint I can find is that perhaps some interaction between extended characters, SOAP::Lite, and my Mac OSX blog clients are to blame.

A friend works at a major financial services company that has just put in such a system, from a bankrupt dot-com formerly known as Melita. The predictive dialer is a computer that sits at his desk. It calls people. As we’ll see below, it presents some problems.

He must sit and watch the screen carefully. Eventually it will flicker a bit, and this means that it has someone on the other end, probably already saying “Hello? Hello?” At this point the employee hits a button and starts speaking, saying “Hello this is Employee from Corporation. May I speak to…” However, the name is not yet available, since the dialer chokes and waits before showing you the name of his target.

If he gets through all of this, then it’s time to ask the person he’s reached “Do you still want the product or service you signed up for?” The contacts list is old, and most of the customers reached are not interested, or moved, or dead by now. Mutual annoyance results for the employee and the customer.

Let’s say we get past this point, and the person he’s called wants to know more about the product. Now my friend may have to do some extended data searching on his computer, or go to other parts of the office to look up data in printed books which are scattered everywhere. Here we encounter another problem. The predictive dialing machine occasionally will flash a little green arrow on its screen. If the call center employee doesn’t click the arrow with the mouse to indicate “I am still on this call”, the dialer disconnects the current call abruptly and moves on to the next one in the list. The idea is probably that dawdling employees will prolong calls or leave calls hanging in order to avoid work and that this is needed to keep them alert and at their desks, taking more calls. So, if he’s away across the room looking up important data for his customer in one of the books, the machine will automatically annoy the hell out of two customers, leaving him to explain to his new victim what happened and hope the previous one calls him back.

So! because bosses don’t trust employees to manage their time, we have a machine that is located slightly too far from the employee’s computer to let him use both; a machine that begins each call by annoying the customer; a machine that hangs up and goes to the next call if a dead man’s handle isn’t constantly held down; and a machine that forces our hero to stare at a flickering screen and won’t tell him the name of his customer until the customer is already angry.

A programmer friend of mine took a job at this company years ago, as a senior architect on a team trying to improve predictive dialing technology. He gave up pretty quickly. It’s easy to see why, if this is their idea of “managing customer relations”.