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Technology can go wrong

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It's Friday and we are having what feels like heatwave weather in Trinidad. I should be glad because living on this tropical island with sun, sea and sand and all I have to do is go to the nearest beach. Mans was hungry and we decided to order food. I did the usual and was not expecting any hurdles. I done this before without any hiccups. I proceeded to pay via card and then was startled by an error message. Remote server has failed. The order was not placed. I checked online banking and payment did go through.

I immediately contacted support through chat in the app and support did confirm seeing the payment and said it would be reversed. I was told a credit card reversal would take 2 to 5 business days to happen. I asked for a discount coupon instead and they said yes. There was some wait and I got my code and tried my order again and that was that. During my plight I was thinking technology is nice most of the times but when it fails it could be a bummer.

Technology will fail sometimes and that is when support, backups, redundancy and resiliency is tested. This was a small problem but sometimes failure can be disastrous. We live in the internet age and cyber attacks and data privacy are big concerns. Prevention and planning is better than cure. We have to imagine what could go wrong and how we can prevent these from occurring firstly. Then what can be done to handle trouble and learn from these troubles. In my case customer service and support was the redeeming bit.

The ability to stay calm under pressure helps when dealing with failure. In the technology world some of the things we have to navigate are risk assessments, best practice, testing, user testing, focus groups, disaster recovery planning, business continuity, and service level agreements. The last thing I would want to see is persons be discouraged away from technology usage because technology goes wrong. Let us show persons that we can respond to technology failures positively and be better going forward. I did work up an apetite while writing this blog post and my food is here. Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
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