Zymurgy's Law and other stuff
Zymurgy's First Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics: Once you open a can of worms, the only way to re-can them is to use a bigger can. This is probably my favorite member of the "Murphy's Laws" family. (Another one is Howard's Corollary: Murphy was an optimist).
About a month ago the BWH Registration systems had a fairly major programming change put into production. This affected Inpatient, Outpatient, Emergency Room, etc. registrations. I had a very small part in the design, mostly sending emails to other programmers (Why did you do it this way and not like this:...). Val (my boss) and I didn't agree with all the design considerations, but "it wasn't our department," so all we could do was sit back, wait for someone to remember to let us know when there was data available to test, and make sure our applications could cope with the new data. Well, a few weeks ago, some our data started looking (to use the technical term) weird. For example, a patient from the foreign city of Boston, MA Japan. The more I looked at the data the worse it got (Zymurgy's Law). In most cases, the programmers just didn't test for half of what they put in. The analysts didn't do much better, but some of that could be because they didn't know what all the changes were (the programmers didn't tell them), so some things simply never got tested until they went live. Since a typical week involves about 3,000 inpatient and 39,000 outpatient visits, the longer this goes on the worse it's going to be to fix all this (another technical term) garbage. What fun!
What are the programmers doing about it? As far as I can tell, nothing so far. I keep writing little ad-hoc programs looking for anomalies and send the results to them. I shouldn't be doing this - "not my department" remember? So, I keep waiting to hear back, "Yes, we know about this. Please wait to hear from us," or something like that. Instead, all I get is, "Oh! We haven't looked into that yet." Have they looked into anything?
Meanwhile, on the domestic front, our bed died. Pat and I have slept on a waterbed for 30 years, but were only on our 2nd mattress. So we definitely can't complain - we got our money's worth. However, after 30 years, the frame's looking very beat-up (rips in the fabric, stuffing coming out, etc.), so we were planning on replacing everything soon. Unfortunately, "soon" became a lot sooner when the mattress got multiple leaks (bringing a whole new meaning to: sleeping in the wet spot). Fortunately, the leaks weren't "spectacular," like they could have been, so all we had to do was drain the mattress, drag it out to the trash, and put our camping air mattress in the frame until we get around to buying the new bed. We’re using this as an opportunity to rearrange our room, since trying to move a waterbed is only possible when it's empty, so our room has looked pretty much the same since we moved in 25 years ago. Besides, the new arrangement should confuse the cats, so it's worth the entertainment value if nothing else.
The good news: I now have the waterbed heater and should be able to use it to heat the mud pit overnight. Of course, the one place where we could really use it (Connecticut in October) is the one place we won’t be performing at this year. Ah well…