Ron/others giving min.prep advice read/ contemplate this report before doing so again! But, factor in that this story does NOT include any problems from emb systems, thereby making it as minimalist a senario as possible!
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It's Just One Thing After Another -- And Next Year, it Will Be Worse -- Robert Kuttner
washingtonpost.com.
The author here describes the high tech systems that failed on him last week. They all started acting buggy. His work slowed down. He can't get as much accomplished.
Today, we spend our lives on phone trees. People have been fired. We can't get competent help.
Technological whoz kids run our lives. They don't have mature judgment.
Next year, it's y2k, when things will really start acting up.
He isn't looking forward to it. He calls it "System Meltdown."
This is from the WASHINGTON POST (Aug. 13).
* * * * * * * * * *
I just had a chilling preview of the Y2K problem six months early. . . .
In a single horrific week, the following things happened:
My laptop computer stopped working, and the needed part is on indefinite back order from Japan. My warranty obligates Toshiba to fix it. It just doesn't specify when.
My home telephone, which has two lines (one for e-mail and faxes) chose this week to get cranky. The lines are crossed, and with deregulation the phone company no longer comes out to fix it instantly.
By coincidence, my office moved last week, too. The phone installation took a week longer than expected. And the company that hosts our e-mail belatedly advised that it doesn't service our new location.
So, I can use e-mail from home, but not from the office. However, I can't efficiently telephone from home, which makes it hard to use e-mail as well as make calls.
I took a cell phone to work, but the cell phone is now balky, too. It has begun displaying terms I've never seen before, like "outdoor," and only puts calls through when it feels like it. (Do I call AT&T or Nokia?)
In short, all my systems and back-up systems are failing. . . .
I now spend half my life on hold in a voice mail hell (press 3 if you want to slit your wrists). . . .
I draw several inferences from this technological meltdown. First, the new technology is said to be "empowering." Ha. Ho. Hee.
Wired Magazine, shrine to the new technology, says, "We are as gods and we might as well get used to it." But in truth, we are more like the Sorcerer's apprentice.
Ordinary tools are now more baroque than they're worth. As high-tech systems become more complicated, they have more ways to go awry. . . .
Information technology, as Nobel economist Robert Solow likes to observe, only seems to make us more productive -- because we spend so much time learning things that soon become obsolete, as well as time making the damned stuff work at all. . . .
In the Information Age, when technology changes ever more rapidly, the smartest and most indispensable person in the office is usually the youngest (who grew up with this stuff).
This inversion is splendidly democratic -- an unprecedented reversal of the normal hierarchy of large organizations. But it adds to the precariousness of our working lives.
Kids are known for quick learning but not for mature judgment. Some "neat" innovations that appeal to 25-year-old techies are also pretty goofy when ordinary adults try to use them for routine tasks.
Note that all of this pre-dates the Y2K problem. Despite all the investment in making old computer systems compatible with the millennium, in six months the technology will likely break down in multiple ways that nobody has foreseen. . . .
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