Oops!

We're trying to implement a new accounting system that's integrated into our on-line ordering system. Sounds boring, right? Yeah. It is. Really tedious. There's a reason accountants have that sort of reputation... they deserve it. And computer geeks... they might inherit the earth, but they will have absolutely no idea what to do with it when they get it.

I digress. This was supposed to be about 'Oops!'.

We're trying to take people out of the equation. That is, we're trying to automate the system so that there's no possibility our people can 'forget' to do whatever it is they forgot to do that made me decide to automate the process in the first place. (People do that... they forget stuff. Mostly, machines don't.)

To bring the system on line, we had to write a little script that... oh fuck it... you don't care what the little script was supposed to do, and frankly, neither do I. I just know it didn't do it right.

What it did do was send out an invoice this morning to our best customer...

... for forty seven million, two hundred and sixty eight thousand, one hundred and ninety one dollars and fifty three cents.

That's an awful lot of whatever it is we sell... even the expensive stuff.

It got me to thinking about the nature of intelligence and whether these machines of ours will ever be able to look at the invoice before it goes out and say "that doesn't look right".

I suspect never, but when we discovered the error, we called that machine a great many names, many of which involved gratuitous use of that F word and that other C word, and even a B word and a P word or two. All of those words were intended to hurt its feelings.

At least the customer has a sense of humour.