The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: February 17, 2008

Official News page 6


REAL LIFE NEWS: YOU'VE ALL BEEN VERY NAUGHTY BOYS AND GIRLS

by Hazed

It's a great idea to use technology to automate things that used to be done by hand - at least, it is until something goes wrong, as happened at a school last week when all 2,550 pupils suddenly found themselves summoned to a detention.

The system makes an automated phone call to parents whose kids have misbehaved, to remind them that the student is due to report for detention on Saturday morning. Unfortunately, instead of the message going to the 16 homes where naughty children lived, it was sent to every single parent.

In this case, the problem hasn't been blamed on the computer, but on human error. The parent notification system, which the school has been running for six years, averages 20,000 calls a week. Half are for student absences and the rest for things such as overdue library books, school calendar events or for emergency communications. Apparently on this occasion, an employee selected the wrong field, sending the message to everybody. By the time the error was discovered, it was too late to call everybody up and take it back - but an apology was sent out by the system over the weekend.

I assume that the manufacturers of the system did their best to make it fool-proof, but if an operator is determined to be really foolish, there's nothing that is completely proof!


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