Or, how to take something that works and screw it up really bad.
Take the example of Garage 4, a parking facility at a famous American medical center. A year and a half ago a Major Renovation for this garage was commenced, to “assure that the garage is serving your parking needs well into the 21st century”. Based on the fact that most of the work involved installing support columns and braces, the real purpose of the project appeared to be to “assure that Garage 4 does not collapse tomorrow”. But the piece de resistance was the plan to modernize the pay system.
Instead of having cashiers manning the toll booths at each exit, it was decided to install massive automated machines near the hospital exits. These amazing machines would accept parking stubs and make change, while instructing visitors in tinny bilingual voices (“Please-pay-here-be-fore-re-turn-ing-to-your-ve-hi-cle”) with an odd resemblance to Al Gore on a stump speech. Thus the med center could do away with those cashiers and save buckets of money!
Not quite.
It turns out that many people are stumped by the machines, can’t understand the instructions and go out to their cars expecting to pay at the exit, only to have to turn around in frustration when the gates don’t open. The administration has had to hire “parking ambassadors” (I swear to God) to babysit the machines, plus extra staff at the exits to prevent riled drivers from ramming the gates. At any given time there may be half a dozen or more “parking ambassadors” keeping the peace. Hey, three times the staff on the payroll, complicated expensive machinery and pissed-off visitors! Sounds like progress to me!!
And a brief word about those automatic flush toilets in my building. The ones that are supposed to detect motion, as when you finish your bout of elimination, and flush on cue. Either they fail to flush at all (this always seems to happen when someone has taken a King Kong-sized dump in the stall), or they flush repeatedly, a real thrill for whomever is seated on the throne and enjoys a sitz bath every 10 seconds. The Next Generation of automatic toilets has an added manual lever to cope with Problem A. But it’s still fun and frolic in most bathrooms. Fellas, American plumbing is what made this country great. Don’t screw around with it.
