Our Smart Systems Are So Dumb

Our smart systems are so dumb.

It is almost like they thought of everything. Rules are set up. The IF THEN ELSE statements are all well thought out for most of the possibilities.
Except they really can’t be. Infinite possibilities exist but code is limited. It works most of the time. But sometimes it misses something obvious.

The other day I had an enlightening shipping experience.

I ordered a docking station and a laptop from Lenovo. The docking station was delivered without incident. The laptop was delayed. At first I thought nothing of it. Then I looked at the tracking record and noticed it said information was missing from the label.

I called UPS to add the information. I was told that the recipient couldn’t make any changes to the shipping address and that those had to be initiated by the shipper.

I called Lenovo to see if they would update the shipping information. I was told by the customer service rep that they couldn’t do that because the record was locked.

So it appears that neither the recipient nor the shipper can make any changes. Two ends of the same transaction. Both locked out.

Hopeful, I logged in the next day expecting to see that the address had been updated and that the unit would be shipped to the right place. Instead I saw that the unit was being shipped back.
UPS had sent a message — galling in its tone — explaining that they had attempted to correct the address but couldn’t, and therefore the unit was being returned to the sender. The message was passive, institutional, and completely absolved of accountability. The system tried. The system couldn’t. The system is returning your laptop. Have a nice day.

I offered to pick the laptop up at the UPS facility. That was not presented as an option.
The dock arrived. The laptop is going back. Same order. Same address. The smart system sorted them differently, couldn’t be corrected by either party, and couldn’t accept a reasonable alternative offered by the person most motivated to solve the problem

.
I called Lenovo again. The customer service representative told me to rest assured. My case would be handled with high priority.
He had sent an email to a team.
Nobody made a mistake. Nobody broke a rule. Every IF THEN ELSE statement executed correctly. UPS locked the recipient out for security reasons — correct. Lenovo locked the record because it was in transit — correct. The return was triggered automatically because the address was flagged — correct. The system worked flawlessly and produced a completely wrong outcome because two correct rules contradicted each other in a situation that a human being would have resolved in thirty seconds.

The system had no way to say: wait. This doesn’t make sense.

A person at a UPS counter with a phone and thirty seconds of authority would have fixed this. The smart system, with all its rules and all its logic, handed me back to the oldest and most broken information transfer mechanism available.

An email. To a team. That nobody named.
Rest assured.