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Verizon software didn't screw Massachusetts towns, Verizon employees did
By adamg on Sat, 12/17/2011 - 1:04pm
A story in the Globe today has the following headline and sub-headline:
Verizon to pay $800,000 settlement
Phone company says cities, towns were overcharged because of software
But as Steve Garfield notes, that's wrong, because as the story itself says, the problem was that employees entered the wrong data into the software:
It's human error. The 'software' doesn't make the error, a human does.
Having newspaper headline writers write captions for stories about software is like having politicians write legislation about the internet.
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Comments
Left out the all-purpose blame-it-on-the-machine buzzword
Isn't that sub-head supposed to read
The Glitch Who Stole Christmas
You're right, it's not really much of a software story without a glitch.
An irrationally sweeping
An irrationally sweeping judgment to make based on a single, pretty unimportant screw-up in a kicker (not even the main headline). The writer could simply have been reading too fast: i.e., the very "human error" to which the writer refers. Rather than questioning journalists' expertise in computing, this questions this blogger's expertise in journalism, or at least in logic and sincerity.