The Legel Report

As you all know by now, I live vicariously through my wife and children. Lately it has been a real wonder to hear what Tracey has been going through at work. You may recall the logistical mess caused by the corporate decision to migrate to a web based email system. It gets better. In an effort to help speed things up Tracey’s boss approved a new desktop computer for her. It arrived Wednesday on Tracey’s day off. Tracey was at meetings all day Thursday so yesterday was her first chance to deal with it. It didn’t work. It would not boot up. A code came up telling her to run the diagnostic and it says she has no hard drive. She called tech support and they asked her to open it up. So she tears apart her new computer to discover the hard drive isn’t connected. She fixes it. It boots up. The email is still terribly slow as we predicted it would be but at least she has a nice new clean computer and a new flat screen monitor which gives her more desk space. Oh ... and a new optical mouse! No more cleaning mouse balls.

The tech support dude also tells Tracey he can’t install the desktop version of Lotus which would speed up her email immensely. Evidently it takes nearly the same amount of paperwork and bureaucratic maneuvering as an Act of Congress to get the “special permission” required to do this. Obviously everybody wants it because their email is now virtually useless as a real time tool.

Thursday night after a day wasted on meetings Tracey gets a call from her clinic and they tell her a vital medication called Heparin has been recalled and this causes major complications for patients and staff. This drug prevents blood clotting and without it they must spend a lot of time rinsing the blood lines with saline and the patients are losing blood in the process. Tracey is surprised there has been no news coverage of this because it is a major big deal. Hospitals and clinics across the country are scrambling to find this drug to treat their patients.

Now we come full circle back to the cost and frustration of something as simple and short sighted as an email “upgrade”. Instead of emailing each other in real time, much like instant messaging, Tracey’s area manager was forced to set up a conference call to get everybody together and fax stuff all around to the various clinics because the email no longer works fast enough. They waste precious communication time while the patients have to endure not having the drugs they need. And a corporate decision to save money on software has already cost more then they will save all year (or maybe longer) in the cost of new computers, conference calls and fax calls. But it will go down in the corporate books as a huge cost savings and somebody will likely get a six or seven figure promotion out of it. Corporate America at its finest.

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