| First, let's acknowledge that when the actions of some people lead to endangering a human life, it's natural to be angry about it. Personally, when anger is justified, I feel more comfortable with people who clearly and openly express it. I find them more reliable, more honest, and usually better people to be around. By my standards, I'd even consider the style very mild, considering a life is on the line. I would also consider it normal to be on the receiving end of such language if my own work resulted in such a situation. That would cause me to pause and reflect. The intensity of feedback is information. If everything is bland, it's harder to know how important something is or not. Logic has a limit because you don't have all the parameters from the other side. It works the other way around. The overuse of superlatives and day-to-day outrage is equally unproductive. This is not the case here, IMO. |
The thing that's really bugging me is that this is not what happened at all!
"I'm not at home, please send the new pump to my hotel."
That's it! That solves the entire problem in 5 seconds plus the time to tell the customer service rep the hotel's address and verify it's correct. Yeah, there were some other structural problems that led to other dumb things, but none of that would have even come up if she'd done the blindingly obvious thing and had the life-saving, 24/7-required device shipped to her actual location. If anyone endangered her life, it was her, through her own actions.
She really crossed the line for me by wishing harm on the people who designed and built her insulin pump. What the hell? They've done nothing wrong. Yes, her pump was beginning to fail, but 1) it was still limping along with a workaround and she wasn't in immediate danger (and if it did fully fail, she said she was within an hour's drive of an ER at all times, which she felt was fine), and 2) she had never had a pump problem in twenty-five years, which is an amazing testament to the reliability of these devices. The people who work on these things deserve a freakin' medal, not bullshit like "the people who design, sell, and service these machines are both keeping me alive and also my mortal enemies".