The surprising trap of technology's reliability

When a technology appears to be completely reliable and stable, we develop expectations that it will always work.

For example, telephones. Not cellphones or Internet-based phones, but the old fashioned land-line telephones with cords, plugged into a standard phone jack. They work. Even when electricity is not available to a home, the phone still works.

The trap becomes a complacency in expecting service at all times and forgetting about equipment breakdowns, unforeseen incidents – acts of God – and normal operator error.

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the nation was horrified. Before the tragic accident, so many shuttle launches were successful, as a nation we stopped worrying about space travel and regarded it as safe. It’s not. A lot can go wrong.

The same goes for driving a car. It doesn’t take much in operator error or an equipment failure to cause a tragic accident.

I find it strange how some of the technologies developed in my lifetime are starting to fall into the same “it works all the time, it must be immune to failure” type of thinking.

Back to phones.

Everyone has a cellphone and they carry it all the time to be available to take a call. We are beginning to expect instant connection to people when we call their cellphone. But, sometimes the battery is dead, the signal strength is too weak to receive, we may have left the ringer turned off or perhaps it was forgotten at home, in the office or in the car. Cellphones are not a 100 percent, guaranteed to connect, method of communication yet.

Voicemail is another. Yes, every cellphone has it. Yes, a majority of home and businesses have it. Most have a caller ID too. But from time to time I get voicemail where the cellphone signal drops and the phone number being left by the caller is garbled. For all the sophistication of the Columbia Basin Herald phone system, it does not leave a caller ID when we call and does not list one for voicemails we receive.

This is frustrating at times because some people call, leave a message and do not leave a phone number to call them back. Or, they spit it out so fast it is impossible to write it down. Slow down. Two more seconds of recording won’t hurt either of us.

E-mail is perhaps a better example of the technology trap. It’s completely reliable, right? OK.

With the number of spammers still trying to scam money, we employ spam filters to stop junk mail from clogging our computer system. Sometimes this wonderful bit of software technology snags legitimate e-mail from people we want to hear from. Occasionally the sender is mad because we didn’t reply. Unfortunately, they do not know their e-mail is sitting with all of the fake Viagra ads. I feel bad for them and share their anger over not getting their e-mail. Sometimes it is a bad address or a severely crippled server, between sender and receiver, that causes e-mail to go missing.

Yet despite all of the traps a tried-and-true technology can create, I still enjoy seeing what it can offer in expanded capabilities and savings in time.

We have a new computer software at the Columbia Basin Herald. It connects our news, advertising, production and management departments and helps make us more efficient. We are still learning how to master the new system. It offers some incredible features. One is remote connection.

Today, I read news stories, arranged them in order of appearance for the pages, left notes for the paginator to finish the work and wrote this column away from the office. At home? Nope. I am sitting in my mother-in-law’s house, staring at snow capped hills and tall green pine trees, towering over Lake Okanagan, in Westbank, British Columbia, Canada.

 Yes, I like new technology. But I still need to be vigilant for the traps of technology’s reliability or some day I will be up against a deadline, cursing a slow Internet connection or a malfunctioning server – or worse, operator error.

Bill Stevenson is the managing editor for the Columbia Basin Herald. He enjoys technology, when the little silicon gremlins are not at work.