Why people hate computers

The other night we stopped at Lowe’s on our way home to return the one unused box of tile from our bathroom remodel. That’s one box containing twelve tiles. One box, twelve tiles. The new employee working the returns counter started entering information into the returns software on the computer (Having new employees work the return counter because no one else wants to is a bad idea, imho, but that’s another post altogether).

She asked us the standard questions, “Why are you returning the tiles?”, “Phone number?”, etc. She scanned the barcode on the box, and then looked thoroughly confused as the software asked her a question she didn’t understand. “How many units??”, she mumbled. She asked several other employees about it, and after several who didn’t know whether she should enter one or twelve (one box, twelve tiles), they settled on twelve.

Unfortunately, that turned out to be the wrong answer. I learned later that because their inventory system stores the tiles as units by box, the correct answer was one.

Thinking she had entered the right answer, the employee continued through the software to a point where it informed her that she was about to accept a return of twelve boxes of tile.

Oops, but no big deal. She would just need to change the return quantity, or in the worst case, cancel the return and start over, right? Wrong. When she tried changing the quantity to one, the software created a new return item of one box of tile while also keeping the existing twelve boxes. Now the system thought we were returning thirteen boxes of tile.

After several employees came by and stared at the screen, and several calls to managers, who also tried changing the quantity to one (after a while, the system thought we were returning more boxes that we originally bought!), the conclusion was that someone needed to MIS. M … I … S, cue ”Theme from Mission Impossible” (with apologies to Lalo Schifrin).

At this point I thought, ok, she’ll make a quick call on the store phone, and an MIS geek (I can say “geek” because I am one), will swoop in, hit the magic keystroke, and all will be well again.

“What’s the number for MIS?”

“1-800-…”

Uh oh.

It turned out that “calling MIS” meant calling some central Lowes MIS division, probably located inside a concrete bunker, deep inside a mountain somewhere (there’s that theme song again).

She picked up the phone and called. After explaining the problem several times, and being transferred to the “right” person each time, she reached someone who was able to help. Apparently the tech support person on the other end had to use some administrative interface to the massive returns system to delete the return record.

About an hour, and several tons of frustration (ours, and the employees’) later, we had successfully returned our box of tile.

In my experience, the biggest reason people hate computers is because of poor alignment of the computer and software with the natural flow of their jobs and lives. Instead of being designed to function in a way that flows with and augments their lives, most software forces people to change the way they already do things. Worse yet, when the software doesn’t behave intuitively and the user makes a “mistake”, there is no easy or obvious way to correct the mistake or get help, either from the system itself or from a human deep inside a mountain somewhere..