In
the early days the Personal Computer, a major upgrade was the
addition of a 20 megabyte hard drive – plenty of space for
programs, files and other treasure.
However,
floppy disks were required for sharing files (predates networked
computers, and long before WiFi). Several times a during a day I
would need a formatted disk to hand-carry a file to someone also
working on the same project.
DOS
(where we had to type out all the commands) had a program to format
disks – put a floppy in the drive, access the program, specify the
formatting instruction, and hit enter to begin the process.
The
program quickly formatted the disk – but once activated, there was
no escape or undo to stop the process.
The
early version of the format program assumed the default drive was to
be formatted – which, unfortunately, was the hard drive - so when
the enter key was hit, the hard disk was formatted, unless a floppy
drive was specified...there was a fail/safe message “Are you sure:
Yes/No” (which defaults to “YES”) before the formatting begins.
As
with many repetitive routines, formatting became a mechanical thing –
do this, type that, hit enter. Works fine unless one forgets to
change the default to the floppy drive!
When
I skipped the default drive step – the computer cheerfully
reformatted my hard drive – oh drat!!!! why did I do that? Then I
spent lots of time to reinstall all the programs and reload all the
files to that newly reformatted drive, pledging NEVER
to do that again.
BUT...
After
some time, I skipped that
critical step and once again reformatted the hard drive for
a second time – I
immediately recalled my 'joy' from that earlier time.
Now I had learned
the lesson and changed my
routine to ensure the floppy
disk was the target to be formatted.
My success was bolstered by a change in DOS requiring the drive
letter to be entered and the availability of pre-formatted disks.
Routines
that become mindless and mechanical, but have significant potential
for disaster, need a proactive
fail/safe of some sort –
pilots, for example, use
a paper checklist to document the pre-flight inspection and
preparation.
It
is pretty much impossible
to avoid the mindless – mechanical human approach to repetitive
processes, but designing out the potential of a misstep (or seriously
reducing its risk) is a valuable
investment in avoiding a
catastrophe and wasted
resources.
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