We`ve all had them in our lives at some point or another. Moments where bleeding-edge technology has contrived to let us down, and we find ourselves catapulted back a decade or more, perversely using outdated systems as a backup for modern equipment or software.
In my time, I`ve worked at a publishing house where around deadline time, the Internet server was guaranteed to fall over with the extra activity on the line. The solution? I would telephone friends at companies with more realistic bandwidth prospects and ask them to describe Web pages to me.
Another time, when the e-mail connection collapsed on me, I was forced to print out copies of my e-mails and fax them to people at other companies.
More recently, a bizarre situation that prevented me from using the office printer meant that I had to e-mail my documents to another member of staff who could see the blasted machine, to have them printed for me.
It`s funny how convoluted solutions for technology that is supposed to work quickly become acceptable. You can often find companies completing a dogs-leg racetrack to get something done that had once taken one or two easy steps, and it no longer occurs to anyone that this is a bizarre process.
Parking insanity
For me, the most perfect example of this is the set up at the Rosebank Mall parking garage.
It`s funny how convoluted solutions for technology that is supposed to work quickly become acceptable.
Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm
Long ago, when you had finished your shopping, you would proceed to the exit where a friendly booth operator would greet you, accept your payment and wish you a nice day. This process was uncomplicated, friendly and it provided much needed work for the low skills level citizens of our nation for whom unemployment is such a huge problem.
A number of steps along the way have rendered this system far from ideal. Firstly, in the event of a power failure, parkers are stuck in the parking garage, unless the booms are left open. This loss of revenue being unpalatable to management, a backup generator system was installed to ensure the system could keep on chugging, well into an eternity of blackout.
No such backup is offered to the shopkeepers on the same premises, who pay their monthly rental regardless, but who likewise lose income as a result of power failures. Parking has become an obsessive moneymaking exercise. Skyrocketing parking costs in all of Johannesburg`s shopping centres bear testimony to this.
On top of this, most of the payment machines are unwilling to accept standard currency. Notes are spat out, R5 coins are rejected one after the other.
A complex network of security guards has been established in underground booths to enable parkers over intercoms to plead to be let out, regardless of their non-payment. Security guards are then dispatched from the belly of the garage, to "meet you at the exit" and ensure your release. This extra step has now been rendered defunct by another piece of parking inanity.
Any chance taken
People being what they are, this system had another chink in it, which soon became apparent. With no operator at the payment booth, young urban cowboys would tail each other out through the booms, meaning only a single payment was solicited for every two, or even three, cars parking at peak times.
The solution has been to post security guards at each exit, at a second set of booms, to allow people to pass through this red and white striped airlock system one car at a time. A second security guard will sometimes even offer his assistance in inserting the parking ticket into the machine, to help make the process easy and friendly.
It just seems to me that there has been an incredible investment in technology that replaced well-meaning staff, which now requires exactly the same amount of manpower to keep turning over, all for the fear of the loss of a few precious parking tariffs.
Am I the only person who finds all of this severely warped?
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