CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--So now there is going to be a designated protest zone at Dodger Stadium so that the anti-vaccine people and Covid-19 deniers can get together and try to convince others not to get a shot.
Will there also be a designated middle finger zone for the rest of us to respond to them?
The sign-up system is exactly wrong
The difference between conservatives and liberals, as far as I can tell, is that conservatives don't want to believe that government can work, nor that it should even be attempted. Liberals, on the other hand, believe that government should be made to work, even when we are frustrated by it.
Well, this is one of those times where everyone is frustrated -- in this case by the vaccine sign-up system.
The system is a remarkably bone-headed example of a computer programming error. I suspect that it wasn't just the programmers who were at fault, but the head coder should have put up a fuss with whatever bone-head in management designed things in this miserable way.
Here is what has been going on: People hear through the grapevine or from the television news (or even online) that suddenly they are eligible to make an appointment. They even are given an online link. So they try it.
And this is what happens: They see a list of dates and times on the screen. As you might imagine, some are blocked out as no longer being available. So our would-be vaccine patients find open spots and click on them, and are taken to a full page sign up sheet. The victims are invited to type in a name, address, email address (twice), and phone number, and then they are invited to answer a long series of questions about their medical and vaccination history. It's a tedious process, but it would be well worth it if any of us can avoid getting a fatal disease.
And then they get to the end of the questionnaire, and they click to get verification of their appointment, and guess what?
NO APPOINTMENTS ARE AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME
OK, you begin to understand the kind of frustration I've been hearing about from people who have gone through this rigmarole.
Now what I've described to you is a remarkably basic mistake in computer program design. It's about as much of a beginner's error as you can make. The program ought to be doing a preliminary verification that the appointment is available -- and then it should put a temporary hold on that appointment -- before it has the applicant fill in all the rest of the information.
The way it is right now, as best as I can tell, you can click on what appears to be an available appointment time, fill in all your data, and then get dinged -- and then you can try another time, repeat the whole process and get dinged again -- and so on and so forth.
I wonder what the record is for how many times some person has entered name, address, email, email (not a typo, you have to do it twice each time), medical history, ad infinitum. Perhaps Mr. Guinness is waiting in the wings for this new category.
Bugs and Murphy
Back in the days when there were experimental computing devices that used things like electromechanical relays -- things that had moving parts that could get stuck -- something went wrong in a university lab one day and when some engineer was sent to investigate, he found that a moth had gotten stuck in the movement. It wasn't the first time that the word "bug" was used -- the term goes back at least to Thomas Edison -- but this was an actual bug in an actual computer, hence the term computer bug.
The term is now used ubiquitously in computer programming. A bug can be just about anything that is wrong, incorrect, does the wrong thing, or just crashes the whole system.
What we are seeing here is a monumental bug, because instead of finishing the job you started -- to get you a vaccination appointment -- it crashes the whole process by telling you sorry, there is no appointment. At the very least, it should have been designed to hold onto all that information you just typed in and immediately offer you a choice of some other available appointment. That's how a moderately well-designed system would work.
A better designed system would have some sort of entrance portal that tells you immediately that it's going to check your status either as a healthcare worker or as somebody who is 65 or older. That would be fair warning. Then it would offer you the chance to find an available appointment time and -- after you click on it -- that spot would be reserved for you for the next 5 minutes so that you can enter your eligibility information. Then, having determined that you are eligible, it would reserve the appointment for you, pending the immediate completion of the rest of your information. It then (and only then) takes all your medical history information, address, telephone number, and so on.
If the system were designed in this way, the entrance portal could be modified as we go through the various tiers that we hope to complete -- healthcare workers, those 75 and older, those 65 and older, all adults with diabetes, all adults, and so forth. It's a curiosity that the system doesn't operate exactly like this.
Perhaps it is actually designed this way but is just buggy in other ways.
In any case, we seem to have tens of thousands of people who are trying to get an appointment and are wasting their own tens of thousands of hours struggling with these fussy sign-up systems.
Perhaps we are experiencing an example of Murphy's Law here.
For those who are interested in the genesis of Murphy's as well as 5000 other laws, may I suggest The Official Rules, first published in 1979 and now in its umpty-umpth revision. (I would have written "nth revision," but that would have been to play on my inner nerd.)
Addendum: A serious matter
The pages of City Watch have been carrying on a lively debate over the legacy of Donald J. Trump. There are some who think he did a bang-up job. There are those of us who are horrified by the very idea. I suspect we will be debating this topic for years to come.
But in any case, the rationalists on both sides are entitled to present their cases, and in so doing, they are obligated to do more than recite simplistic platitudes.
There are also our underlying assumptions to be considered. I'm with the side that believes in preservation of the natural environment. That doesn't mean that I oppose all mining and oil drilling -- go to it, Texas and Oklahoma -- but that the preservation of pristine wilderness is high on my list. I support preservationist rules and the government agencies that enforce them.
Hence this essay titled How to Kill a Federal Agency, authored by Erik Loomis in the blog Lawyers, Guns & Money. It's about the vandalism Trump did to the Bureau of Land Management.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
