Skip to content

Blame

Mon, 15 Jan 2018, 04:05 PM (-06:00) Creative Commons License

Oops. They pushed the wrong button. You’ve got to pity whoever it was.

You know that it wasn’t their fault per se. Sure, there was in fact a person whose finger pushed a button that sent out a warning that Armageddon was on its way. But it wasn’t their fault — in the sense of “How did the design of our system allow this to happen!?”

So we shouldn’t get so wound up about it, right? 

No. And yes. We should get wound up. Not to blame that poor soul. But to blame the system, the design of that doomsday announcing machine.

So it was just the system’s fault?

Yes. And no. There are, after all, people in charge of this stuff. People who document the procedures and make sure they work. People who design the buttons and make sure they work. People whose job is not only to make sure things work when they must but to make sure that things don’t work when they shouldn’t. There are people whose job is to get it right. And they didn’t. They didn’t do their job.

So it was the system’s fault, yes. But the designers clearly put too little thought into a pre-armageddon-announcment sanity check (say… a second person’s must concur, or a physical barrier to the real button that required both lifting and pushing, or…). 

So by all means, let’s not blame that poor soul whose finger was on the button. And by all means, let’s blame the system’s design. But most of all, let’s blame the dufus-clowns in charge of the end-to-end system who clearly paid insufficient time asking, “How do we make really, really, really sure that we don’t raise a false alarm?”

© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License