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by nathan_long 3028 days ago
Oh, gosh. Really?

It makes me kind of sick imagining that call.

1 comments

You're not even curious to see how it was dealt with and how the issue was expressed to the vendor? I'd never be in a meeting regarding deaths of users of my software, because I just make internal webapps, so I just cannot help but be curious as to how one of those meetings would go.
> I'd never be in a meeting regarding deaths of users of my software

I know what that's like.

About 20 years ago I was at a consulting firm supporting an electric and gas utility company. Among other things they had to do something called "markouts" which means they paint the ground at a location in a way that indicates exactly what infrastructure they have in the ground and precisely where it is. Markouts are a government organized thing. Before digging somewhere you can call a number and anybody that might possibly have infrastructure in the ground anywhere near your dig site is required to paint their markouts within a short time period. There are stiff fines if you "miss a markout."

Anyhow there was a data problem with a markout. The field worker was sent to paint a markout at the corner of two streets that actually ran parallel to each other and didn't meet. Instead of calling it in and questioning the task he did nothing. Shortly after a construction worker put a backhoe through an electrical conduit with 15K volts. There was an explosion that was heard for many miles. The worker died the next day. He died painfully.

> so I just cannot help but be curious as to how one of those meetings would go.

Finger pointing, of course. Data was being fed back and forth between systems and eventually somebody else took the blame. The field worker who ignored the markout also was blamed. We did add something to our system so that that kind of data error would raise an exception.

I learned a lot about care and diligence about data from this experience. Data errors are no joke.

Sure but

> I'd have loved to be a fly ...

loving anything about that sad scenario seems impossible.

It's a figure of speech, not a show of approval.
Even loving learning enough to avoid the next one? 'Cause that's what responder wants, to learn. "What the hell were they thinking?" is often the most pertinent knowledge of all.
I'm not, because it would bore me. I see shit like that for breakfast when studying transportation. But if you don't do it, I say it's because of your own primal instincts, so you stuff them down...