Tyranny of the Bytes

It started when I called Sprint two weeks ago. My wife wanted to have a corporate cell phone, and it seemed like a reasonable expense.

When I bought my last SmartPhone, it took the salemsan over four hours to configure it, as they had never done one like this before (several years ago). So from bitter experience I wasn't about to go in and simply ask someobdy. I called up to make sure we could get another phone.

The answer was yes we could have a phone, but we couldn't have a phone line to go with it. They would sell a phone to my business, but would not provide a line.

I must have placed a dozen or more calls to these guys asking a simple question "Can I have another line on my business account? And if not, can you tell me why?

Nobody could fix the record, nobody could tell me why. People just kept sending me to some other department. Eventually, I figured out the calls formed a large circle, with each number sending me to the next number on the circle. Kind of like a big honking merry-go-round, with customers riding round and around.

That was fun.

Eventually they told me their system was broken and they had to open a help ticket. It seems that every business account should automatically be approved for ten lines, but I was not. A couple of calls later on the following day they told me that no, the system was not broken but I had to fill out some more paperwork. When I asked what kind of paperwork, they didn't know (but I got the next number in the merry-go-round). Finally, this morning some supervisor just brute-forced the change in the record. Problem solved. She told me I was great to be so patient and "the squeaky wheel gets the oil"

Feeling kinda lucky, I went to the HP web site to order a replacement notebook computer. I spent an hour on the site, then another couple of hours pricing out components with various vendors, then completing the order. I thought about calling, but hey, that's what the online system is for, right! To make ordering easy.

The order didn't go through.

So I'm on the phone to HP. Once again, the people at the call center don't know what is going on. I spend a couple of hours with them, examing the order, the charge method, etc. Turns out it was my bank that was the problem. One phone call to the bank was not enough, so the bank and I spent another hour calling each other back and forth.

Now, six hours later after I started the process with HP, I believe my order has been placed. I'm not completely sure, but I think so.

What's up with all of this complexity? You go to buy an airline ticket somewhere, and you might as well be playing the slots -- every time the rate is a little different. You buy insurance, and you might as well throw darts at the wall -- the products are so complicated I don't think anybody really knows what they are getting. When it comes time to pay your taxes, you have to pay one group of people money just to be able to ask the right questions of you to get the right answers.

As a software architect who has trained software architects, we make our living trying to make complex things simple. Lately, however, businesses have come to us to abstract more and more of their business rules. Business systems are complicating themselves to a degree never before imagined. This means, for instance, that the seat-pricing algorhitm that the airlines use may only be understandable by a couple of dozen people. The tax code in the U.S. is probably incomprehensible in it's entirity. And the insurance industry is actively being rewarded for obscuring from comprehension the very product they are selling. The simple business process flows are highly optimized and productive. But any little deviation in the "Happy Day" flow, and not only is the system out of whack, but the people who run the system are at a loss to know what to do.

There's always been some of that in the world: after all, we pay doctors, lawyers, and CPAs for good reasons. But as computers make things easier to complicate, I can't help but wonder where is it all going to stop?

One day, maybe not too far in the future, we are going to be constrained by our computers and our machines -- don't drive too fast, don't spend your money there, don't eat these certain foods, don't watch these shows, don't exercise like that, etc. And the weird part is, we may not even know why we're being constrained -- the machines will be working at a compexity level that is simply too much for us to comprehend. Right now, you or I could go out and figure out how to run an airline, or how to do our taxes. But how long is that going to last, really?

When people talk about the Singularity, and people merging with machines and all of that, sometimes I think we're thinking of bionic eyeballs or VR neural implants. The reality is much more subtle -- slowly but surely computers will do all the complex thinking for us. We'll be glad to not have to worry about that "trivial" stuff. We're already at a point where most people don't even know how their own businesses operate. Very strange indeed.