A Vacancy Has Been Detected (2019)
kellysutton.com
kellysutton.com
I think it was a simple oversight on behalf of system administrators.
I suspect the only "right" way to handle things like this is by the automated system having certain pathways that require human interaction for edge cases. That way "student X dropped out" and "student Y died" can be treated differently without needing a workaround or complaint. If the system tracking dorm allocations notes a vacancy, it can also note "but I can't handle this one" and assign appropriately.
A vacancy has been opened up. That will trigger numerous consequences across the system. Yes, every time you observe such consequences, you will be reminded of its cause -- the roommate's death. But it's unrealistic to expect every other subsystem not to do anything that reminds you of that death, which, as far as I can tell, is the extent of this email's "wrongdoing".
"Woe is me, how dare you, the housing system, refer to my roommate's death as just another vacancy." Come on, now.
There is that version of the Monty Python "Dead Bishops" skit, where the murderer says "It was me, but society is at fault." Consequently the Church Policeman asks all the other people present: "Excuse me, are you a member of society?" - "Yes." - "Come with me, then."
Mortality in college students is something around 15 in 100000, a campus of 10000 can expect a student death per year. It's surprising that there were no processes in place to act appropiately in that situation.
I feel it’s like blaming your roomba for running over your graduation certificate when it could have recognized it and paid due respect. Automated systems are a thing now, and the mail was explicitely signed as coming from automation, with a neutral and polite enough language. We should accept it as it is IMHO.
I am less intransigent when it comes to potentially hurt feelings.
It literally came down to, and I paraphrase, “and this experience taught me the lasting lesson that software will interact with human beings in a variety of contexts and situations that we may not anticipate. We should be thoughtful, to not hurt people who interact with our software in ways we didn’t bother thinking about”.
That’s not a bad idea.
Even knowing this happened, I don't see how it should have been done differently. Eventually you have to do something about the vacancy. Communicating to the author about the vacancy will remind him of the death. It's unavoidable.
It's "overblown" to expect everyone not to communicate to you in any way that calls back to your roommate dying.
>Did you read the actual post?
Yes.
Edit: To put it another way, let's say this email was sent how the author would have preferred. Next semester, then what? They have to keep adding a blurb about sympathy for the roommate's death, every time the vacancy is mentioned? Eventually you have to accept that "no, the world isn't going to keep dancing around this".
The automated email should have been sent to the building coordinator who could have acted on the automated request to assign a new roommate or not as appropriate. At the very least, there is a vacancy halfway through the year for a reason. How many of the possible reasons might benefit from considerate handling? Sometimes impersonal centralisation works well, and sometimes not.
The system worked as intended. Part of emotional maturity is learning to cope with "cosmic indifference." It's not a defect to engineer out of day-to-day life. Or if it is, it falls at the bottom of my list.
IMHO this request reflects a mind-boggling level of privilege.
Well said.
If anything, the email should be simplified: "The system will be assigning you a new roommate within the week."
Not made to sound like a human wrote it. Not branched into some insincere if(prevUserHasDeceased){comfortCurrentUser()} template.
Just a matter of fact from an indifferent computer doing its job.
Not because the world doesn't need empathy, but to keep it in a mode in which we don't expect it. Just like you don't get mad at your dog when it waits for your deceased partner to get home, nor at their cellphone's low-battery chime for not knowing it won't be needing a recharge, nor at the stoplight for not knowing you're late to the wake.
Then they are incompetent at their job, and require either better tools/support or replacing with a competent professional.
The mail is pretty factual, polite, doesn’t assume circumstances that could be ill fited. I saw it more as an exemple of a decent wording that anything else.
We simply can,t be responsible for all the empathy required.
Here's my takes on this:
> The System had sent an automated email now that some school administrator had signaled that my roommate would not be returning that semester.
That guy should have be aware of the implication of his actions and he should have been the one responsible to apply empathy in this case. It's not the responsibility of the software to be designed for empathy, all its does is execute preprogrammed actions to make life easier to the one responsible to do theses actions. If theses actions weren't the correct one based on a situation, then the one responsible to do them should do them, that's it.
A lot of these things cannot feasibly be thought of in advance, and the offense is often more due to ignorance of the automated nature of the system. E.g. at a coding summer camp people received passwords with two random words and two random numbers. Profanity was blacklisted as well as some number combinations (69, 88, maybe more). One class had someone take offense at the password "bloodyunhappy12" - thinking this was a derogatory reference to menstruation. Are we really going to try and think of every pair of words that might cause offense? Letting people pick their own passwords meant a lot of people had insecure passwords, so this random words + numbers was the best approach. Similarly an airline got in trouble for generating a confirmation code "H8GAYS": https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adriancarrasquillo/delt...
Furthermore, it just substitutes one failure mode for another. After a dozen instances of telling people they're getting a new roommate because the old roommate moved out due to normal reasons, how confident are you that this staff member is going to check whether the previous occupant died or otherwise left due to sensitive reasons? Chances are, this same blog post would be written except that instead of "I got this tone-deaf email telling me I'm getting a new roommate" it's "This tone-deaf staff member told me I'm getting a new roommate".
Does it? If a human composed and made the decision to send an email to a student who's roommate had recently taken their own life and said "we've detected a vacancy" there would be some serious questions asked around their emotional capacity.
I am reminded of the automated email I received from my company's HR software, just prior to my summer intern going back to school. The email asked if I had run through the checklist for the pending "termination" of my "resource". I went to the HR director and was like "WTF, can't we inject a little humanity into Human Resources?" She just shrugged it off, saying the emails were built into the system.
But that's neither here nor there either. This isn't necessarily about "what could the system have done better in this situation". It's highlighting that software ultimately leads to inhuman interactions; no person would have come in and said that. In fact, no person would know about the vacancy, without also knowing the reason for it (without either a system, which again highlights the problem, or another person, who would have explained the circumstances, being the one to deliver that information to them). And that's something we can work to improve, even if we can't address every possible instance.
I use Expensify at work. It's clear that thee UX team consider a 'cutesy' UI to be a higher priority than a functional user experience.
Many workflows are horribly broken (race conditions, dialogs with missing pieces, broken links). And it's CRUD for expenses, how hard can it be?
And then infantile messages like "whoops! Looks like something's up with xyz" and emojis everywhere. Messages like "relax, your expenses are done" with hammock pictures. It's infuriating after I took hours to input a dozen receipts.
I'd rather have a precise functioning tool. Tell me which receipts had which issues, or what needs my attention.
I'm all for minimising human discomfort, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease!
So you can improve it with either more empathy or more automated-form design.
"A vacancy has been detected in your room. You may be reassigned a roommate. Visit foobar.com/roommate-assignment for details, or get in touch with the campus housing team at 1234567890."
I work on a CI system that supports an app with more than 150000 tests. At that size we have to remove tests to manage intermittent test failures. In the beginning we were removing those tests manually and developers would argue with us a lot. Especially about the methodology that we used to determine that a test is intermittently failing. Since we switched to a bot the arguments stopped. I guess it seems less arbitrary if an automated system disables tests rather than an human.
It comes up as a joke trope in some movies, but I grew up around that sort and it's not inherently bad. It has a way of avoiding scenarios like the one you illustrated.
I recall I was fairly young and we lost a family pet, and every time someone tried to console me by bringing it up it was like a doctor palpating an injury. Yes, we know it hurts, why are you touching it!? It felt a bit like it was happening all over again. It felt, to be honest, a bit cruel.
If I had been in your situation, at that age, I might have written it down on a piece of paper, so I only had to get through admitting they were gone the one time on someone else's terms.
Because I think they, too, know that they are making an impossible ask. They may have even tried but realized it's too sheepish to encode some one-size-fits-all Hallmark card into an automated message of a system that simply informs you that it will be assigning you a new roommate.
"Condolences!"
"We [, the developer who wrote this automated message 2 years ago,] are sorry!"
I think the opposite approach is better and more sincere: remove all half-attempts at sounding human from automated notifications, no pretense or deceit. Just a computer doing its job under the same expectation of empathy and understanding as your electric toothbrush.
This aspect of their system was not designed with much empathy in the first place. Dorm rooms should not be treated as warehouses to be filled with inventory. At the very least a manual override was available.
If the roommate had dropped out it's unlikely the author could have pulled that off since there is less claim to being emotionally unable to accept a roommate that the college has to accommodate.
Not true, this happened to me because my roommate found a different dorm hall he preferred and requested a move to it. (Similarly, deciding that you'd rather be in an apartment off campus.)
Hey, maybe that was, in part, driven by how he couldn't stand me. Still, not something I'd call "sad".
My main point is that this a dorm-room vacancy involves changes in human relationships, such changes are often likely to involve strong emotions, and as such should be handled much differently than say, a notice that says the cafeteria will close half-an-hour early on Friday. There are cases where the remaining roommate is even happy to have their roommate leave (for whatever reason), but it's still best to initially approach the situation with extra care, just in case.
Isn't notifying the room's occupant a fairly human thing to do? If they were treating the dorm like a warehouse, maybe they wouldn't have notified Kelly at all, and just sent a new roommate. It seems at least partially empathetic to give people advance warning of a change, even if the system is automated.
The human who wrote the automated text was probably coding toward identifying vacancy. Aha! Vacancy detected! What's more natural than coding that into the alert message? That person is probably not thinking about the death of a student, a less frequent event than graduating, moving, whatever.
I get what the author is trying for, there are actually heartless automatic messages involving actual death or traumatic events. This is not those. I'm not thinking about how to not inadvertently hurt someone's feelings when I'm writing logs, it's first written in a very confined objective for me.
> A Vacancy Has Been Detected
Whereas the email is in the active voice
> We have detected a vacancy in your room
The active voice sounds a bit more personable and less robotic.
I think a ‘410: Gone’ might be better.