20 January 2023
Entered on: 	Thinkpad R60
Entered where:	At work
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My wife and i were at our local hospital yesterday to make
arrangements for the birth of our child (planning, signing
documents and so on). The - absolutely sane - policy of the
hospital is to get the paperwork done some time before the
real action begins and everybody is totally stressed out and
out of their mind.  

The hospital staff was (as always) competent and really well
organised, but one thing i have now observed multiple times
is that it seems to be considered normal that the PCs in the
doctors office freezed up multiple times, that patient
management software can only be exited through the windows
task manager and that it is also considered normal that you
need multiple attempts to log into the system. As they said:
"Nothing out of the ordinary, its in this state since
years".

I thought: WTF? Is THIS the actual state of software
quality? I mean - as i said - the hospital is great and the
staff from the nurses to every doctor we encountered were
simply professional and well organised, so absolutely no
critique an them (in contrary, its great that they pull off
the professional work under this circumstances). I have
worked as an IT guy in a hospital before (this was my first
real IT job back in 2002) and "back then, in my day" such
occurences where unheard of. The workstations ran on some
BSD derivate our senior SysOp brought in (way before my
time) and everything was simple rock solid.

So... does the clinic just have a bad IT department? Were we
in the clinice where i worked just lucky with our
UNIX-greybeard-wizard (he indeed had a long gandalf-like
grey beard)? I have no idea...