the Evil Line

On Monday I went to Opelousas, Louisiana, to the St. Landry Parish courthouse, to see if I could do something about a $200 speeding ticket.

We sit in the courtroom, but it's too small, so there's a bunch of people waiting outside. The assistant District Attorney reads a list of names from Group 1, a list actually printed out on a dead tree carcass. Those people leave and go somewhere else. He reads a list of people in Group 2 - they leave and go somewhere else. There are four groups. But the ADA has no way of knowing which people are waiting outside, so when new people from outside the courthouse come in and sit in the empty seats, he reads the same lists again, in their entirety. People leave, new people come in, and he reads the list a third time. Of course, I was in the category of "people not in any group", so I had to sit through the whole thing.

There were actually a lot of other inefficiencies in the process, but I'll just complain about that one. And leave the solution as an exercise to the reader.

What brings this up on the blog is this post about the dreaded telecom industry, home to the worst customer service in the world:

The business world runs on software, and most of it is bad software. The back end of just about any major company is a tangled mess of archaic, poorly coded, worse maintained, incompatible software programs written over the past forty years. When you’re dealing with millions of customers via thousands of customer service representatives, your company is only as good as your software. If Verizon had good software, none of these problems would have happened. The web site wouldn’t have let me place an order that would cause the back end to choke; the scheduling system would have gone out more than a month; the order status system would have had usable information; the billing system would have realized that I wasn’t using DSL; the tech support system would have realized DSL was down; a single customer service system would have shown each rep all of my previous interactions.

At least Verizon uses software.