A few days ago I had to travel with an underage family member to a health center in the small town where I am on vacation. As happens now in many customer service places, behind the open counter was a lady so focused on the keyboard and the computer screen that she didn't even notice our arrival.
Attended a user. At one point he blurted out loudly, without looking up: "I can't pull your plug." He picks up a citizen card again and starts typing again, a task that takes a few minutes. In the end, desperate and keeping her eyes fixed on the computer, she complains again, visibly irritated: “I don't know what's going on with the system today. I can't pull your plug».
Meanwhile, people had continued to arrive and the line had started to lengthen in front of the counter. Everyone, including the front user, waited patiently. In this, a young doctor comes in who asks the employee if she can already see that gentleman (The consultations started at 16:00 pm and were 16:15 pm). She repeats, in a mutter, that she can't pull out his file, adding a succession of information about the "system failure". The doctor suggests seeing you while she tries to solve the problem. You go there with her to the office, while my family member and I move to the first place in line. The employee remains totally focused on the computer.
After a few minutes of unsuccessful attempts to "pull the plug", he makes a phone call. Through the conversation, we realized that he was communicating with a computer technician. In response to anything he says to her, her face lights up: "Oh, I'm glad you're on your way."
Hang up and refocus on what you were doing. A nurse enters, with whom she vents again about the system's failure. None of them looked at the line that stretched out. By gestures and movements, I can see that the employee has decided to turn the computer off and back on. As this process goes on, the two talk animatedly about "the failure". People continue to enter in need of care by a doctor or nurse.
Finally, the computer technician arrives. He sits down next to her, in front of another computer on the counter – and she goes back to telling the whole story. He asks her to try to "pull the plug", watching closely, commenting and asking questions. It's 16:30 pm. You arrive from the office with a recipe that "needs the stamps". The employee fulfills this task. He leaves.
The computer technician makes phone calls. As he walked away from the counter, we couldn't hear the conversation. When he returns, he announces: «Olhão has the same problem». She immediately concludes: "Ah, so it's a general failure."
The relief we feel in it is due to the possibility that that information gives him of jettisoning any type of individual responsibility for the “error of the system”. At that moment, and just at that moment – about 40 minutes after this disorder started –, he looks in front of him and sees that there are eight people in line. And, also for the first time, he asks himself (because of his attitude, it is actually an inner monologue out loud): "Does the doctor and nurse want to attend without registration in the system?"
Go inside and come back a short time later. He finally speaks to us: "The best thing is for you to sit down, because, as long as the system is like this, you cannot be attended to and this could take a while." We all sat down. The IT technician continues with cell phone conversations. The nurse is sitting next to the employee, looking at the frustrated attempts she continues to make at the keyboard to "pull out the cards".
In the living room, neither of us says anything, but gradually people leave the health center's facilities, until it's just my family member, me and another gentleman, sitting at the other end of the waiting room. The doctor enters and I take the opportunity to finally let off steam: «Sorry, but this blockage is not noticeable. There is the lady doctor, here are the people who need to be seen by her. It is unreasonable that this failure in the system is an impediment to care, especially in a health center». The doctor agrees with me, but she doesn't move.
The IT technician enters into a dialogue with me: “Do you know what the problem is? Here in IT, it's just me, when we should be two». I politely reply that this is not the problem, repeating that the situation is incomprehensible. Annoyed, he replies: "I'm explaining, but you don't want to understand". I make myself heard again: “I apologize, but I insist that it is incomprehensible not to treat people with health complaints just because the computer system has failed. There should be an alternative». The doctor leaves, the nurse too. The computer technician, visibly upset with me, is silent. The employee continues to play with the keyboard.
Suddenly, his face lights up again: "The system is already working!" It's 17:00. From then on, everything returned to normal. He registered my family member, managing, to his delight, to "pull the record".
In the doctor's office, she began by addressing the young man I was accompanying, jokingly: "I hope your father doesn't come hitting me." We laughed. I will explain my criticism to you again. Listen to me, give me reason, but he replies: «Imagine that you were attended to without being registered in the system. You left here and immediately had a serious health problem. I would be held responsible, with the possibility of serious consequences».
I insist, smiling: "Oh, doctor, I understand that I have to prevent these situations, but how was all this done before there were computers?" He didn't answer me and started to dedicate himself to my family member. We were very well taken care of by her, who seemed to us to be a very nice and competent doctor.
The decision to tell this story was due to the fact that it seems to me to be a perfect example of a more general contemporary problem: the dependence we are becoming on "computer systems" and "digital platforms".
Nobody at that health center even considered registering users manually and, later on, when the computer failure was resolved, entering the data into the computer. As I don't know if this is a higher education that everyone decided to uncritically obey, this chronicle is not useful to point the finger at the health center, but at the dehumanization of human and social relations.
In fact, during those sixty minutes, the employee, the computer technician, the nurse and the doctor did not have the necessary confidence to fully exercise their humanity, leaving her, on the contrary, a prisoner of the alien entrails of a computer application hosted on a computer.
How many more situations of this type are being repeated all over the place, in this era of great enthusiasm with the brilliance and advantages of new technologies? And what are the "platforms", the "computer applications", the "systems" for, if not to be of use to us, to contribute to our emancipation, to enhance the exercise of a humanity that never relinquishes its primordial relationship with the others?
The evident fallibility of these systems, which we have the obligation to predict and prevent, must correspond to real acts based only on the human capacity to resolve situations, to run into difficulties, in short, acts aware of the pseudo-blockages caused by computer breakdowns. And I emphasize the word "pseudoblocks" since, there, it was not the computer system that was blocked, but the humans who, in those circumstances, decided to renounce any trait of the two characteristics that best distinguish us from the computer aliens who invaded our lives : empathy and creativity.
No, I do not accept the anonymous and abstract responsibilities of the «system» in these profoundly anomalous episodes resulting from computer failures: the responsibility is always ours, that of humans, on whom, after all, all organizational systems effectively depend.
And the image that best represents this lack of human responsibility in the life of organizations is, behind an open counter, the face of an employee closed over a computer screen, while in front of her a line of men and women is formed. , young people and children needing to be seen by a doctor.
In the margins of uncertain time, I often seek and find nourishment in the wisdom of my favorite poets. This time, I found it in João Miguel Fernandes Jorge:
It matters that there are no illusions about this point: it is
that we can all die of thirst at sea.
No, in the age of computer systems and digital platforms, I don't want to “die of thirst at sea”.
Author António Branco is a professor and was rector of the University of Algarve
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