Computer Down

Not mine.

I dropped by the district police headquarters in Selayang on the way to work this morning to settle my mother’s speeding ticket, but was turned down because “their computer was down”.

I assume that really it was the network that was down instead of the computer. So, there were a few people sitting at the lounge area waiting for the network to be “up” again, whenever that will be, while the visibly embarrassed policewoman manning the counter helplessly kept telling everyone walking in about the network interruption. She could have just put up a notice.

Really, how often do we experience such a thing at banks, post offices, and government agencies? So much for the government’s digitization initiatives and the Multimedia Super Corridor, I suppose, when everywhere they cannot even setup reliable network systems.

Haven’t they heard of redundant backup systems? The tech people I talked to invariably claimed that it wasn’t their fault, but really the bean counters or top management’s decision to not authorize the necessary budget. SIGH. Don’t they realize that in many ways an unreliable system is worse than having no system at all?

How did we, mankind, survive the centuries before electronics? How hard it is to dig out the old registers and receipt booklets and do things manually in the name of honest-to-God customer service? They can always key in the data later. Unfortunately, we are now pretty much slave to the machine instead of the other way round.
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PS: My mother didn’t really go very fast. She was ticketed for going 96kph over a ridiculous 80kph-speed-limit stretch on the MRR2.