Reader Connection

You get what you ask for

[Editor's Note: We received many letters from readers asking "what was the solution" in the July '99 Up Front editorial. For those of you who wondered, but didn't call, the solution at the post office was provided by a person who remembered there was another regulation which -- with minimal work on our part -- allowed us to mail our Trilogy piece. Dialogue stemming from the column is below. It's lively. KC]

Regarding the Post Office Parable column in Designfax July 1999 -- I was one of those engineers who actually built and installed "million dollar" automation machines in US Postal facilities. I was with Martin Marietta then and our system designers were contracted by USPS to build these machines to perform certain tasks and do nothing more. We were held to exacting standards of operation to process an infinite assortment of mail pieces automatically. We were also under stringent budgetary constraints. After the machines were installed said machines were subjected to mil spec level inspections on physical integrity and then performance tests with live mail. After the rigorous inspection and testing process was successfully completed the machines were presented for acceptance to the postal service -- just as the contract read. The bottom line is that the machines were never designed to accept erroneous postmarks. Perhaps the post office staff should REQUEST human override capability in the original contract specs for new equipment? The engineers only did what the customer asked for (and did an exemplary job).

Thanks for the forum to feedback!

--Larry Holland, Automation Controls Engineer, Leviton, El Paso, TX

Regulations,
regulations

The real victory sounds like it wasn't mind over machinery as much as it was one regulation superseding another because some individual knew how to trump the system and had compassion on you to be willing to trump it. The issue may be the increasingly mindless (thoughtless?) regulatory burden that our nanny state is imposing upon entire industries. Lawmakers and bureaucrats have no concept of the havoc they are creating by foisting new rules upon industry...rules that are irregularly interpreted (called about a tax question lately?) and end up becoming either meaningless, like the original regulation that stopped your mailing, or worse, selectively enforced based upon the ideology of the enforcer.

I don't mean to sound like an anarchist, so please don't think of me as such. Your column was good, but let's not forget that machinery is only a tool, to be wielded for good or evil by the person at the controls.

--Rick Kravik, PE, Possis Medical, Minneapolis

Using one rule or regulation to trump another is becoming the only game in town. It is reminiscent of the way our courts of law operate. Given that most of our lawmakers are lawyers, that's not surprising. Following the "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" concept, they can only see one solution to each perceived problem: add new laws, rules, regulations, and ordinances.

--Ron Darner, Milwaukee

Here's another example of a product pre-empting a human decision, and not allowing an override: In 1998, AT&T offered an attractive offer to entice customers to sign up for their digital PCS cell phone service. The service offered a substantial number of free minutes in a wide calling area.

The offer was such that if I used the cell phone for routine calls from my house to my friends and relatives in New York, the savings on my regular phone bill would pay for the price of the phone. I suspected that the digital coverage in my small suburban town of Wayland, MA, was not too good, but the phone was "dual mode," meaning that if it can't get a digital signal, it falls back to an analog cell. In fact, I was told, in such cases the phone would use the Cellular One analog network, available to AT&T by contract for this purpose.

At home, I charged the phone, and tried it the next day. It was immediately clear that the whole scheme was not going to work because the quality of the audio was horrible. The display on the phone showed that the phone had located a digital signal, but the digital signal was very weak, accounting for the bad quality of the connection.

But what about the phone's capability of falling back on an analog signal? That's what had caused me to think I couldn't lose. I called AT&T service, and asked them how I could force the phone to go analog. The answer: you can't. The phone alone decides if it has sufficient signal strength to go digital, and it errs on the side of digital since AT&T had no desire to connect to the Cellular One network (and to pay for the privilege) if it could be at all avoided.

The next day I returned the phone.

--Lawrence J. Krakauer, Wayland, MA

[Editor's Note: We wrote back to Larry thanking him for the insight on dual-mode phones. He responded with even more interesting comments worth sharing. They appear below. By the way, we think Larry ought to write more!]

Public perception

On a related note, the town of Waylaid is infested with people willing to do battle to the death to keep cellular antennas out due to alleged health effects of microwave signals. Even Wayland resident Amar Bose (of Bose Corp. fame) has come to Town Meeting and testified that he is concerned about health risks. This is a concern about signals with less power than a night light, in a world that is already bathed in much stronger signals in the same general frequency range from all sorts of other sources. It is also in a town, I might add, that was bathed for years in intense emissions from radar testing at Raytheon's Wayland facility (recently closed and occupied by Polaroid).

I also think it's interesting how the general public takes the word "digital" to be a synonym for "quality," when in fact the word just refers to a particular technology. When the digital cell phones first came out, the quality was in fact substantially worse than the analog phones because the engineers traded quality for bandwidth, packing more phone calls into the same space.

Of course, sometimes the industry itself contributes to this sort of confusion. Sprint PCS is now advertising their digital phones as "the clear alternative to cellular." Gee, folks, PCS may be digital, and not analog, but it is still "cellular," no matter how you slice it. Here are a bunch of marketing folks "deliberately" misleading the public about the meaning of a perfectly well-defined word. Like those people who advertise, "Cars go to the mall. That's why we don't make cars." Then they show a picture of their 4-wheel-drive off-road vehicle. It sure looks like a car to me!