Morris Minor Owners Club

Today I took Pam to the eye clinic at the N & N Hopital. They have a flash new booking in system that reads the barcode on the bottom of your appointment letter to book you in, dead clever.

We arrived at the late hour of 5 pm so no one around, tried using date of birth option as we didn't have a letter as it was an emergency appointment and was rejected so had to go to the reception desk anyways.After that Pam went for a wee and I was left staring at the flash new NHS booking machine with barcode reader, boredom got the better of me and I thought wish I had a barcode with me, Ahhhhh flash of inspiration took me, Pams library card has a barcode and I still had it in my wallet so I whipped it out and flashed it under the scanner , poor flash machine gave me a blank screen then reported truncated data error and a lot of other error messages to do with data bases then promply crashed



The appointment was about an hour and when we left that particular terminal was still crashed so it seems they hadn't programmed in what to do if some bored prat scans a library card !!!

Poor programming, not cheap either I bet.

Sanitize your inputs programmers!


http://xkcd.com/327/

Update........Went back today for another apointment and it was still crashed !!!!!

Damn users. If it wasn't for them, the systems would work perfectly.

simmitc wrote:Damn users. If it wasn't for them, the systems would work perfectly.

Sigh, so true

You do realise that due to your highly irresponsible action - 87 people have missed their appointments today, costing the NHS some £936,452............

Not likely as they could, like I did today, use the other 2 booking in machines the amount lost should be Zero as its up to the company that poorly wrote the software to fix it.

That's a bit rich, maybe the software was ok until you got bored!!

It likely read your library card and thought ah! human being, must find records and disappeared up it's own database.
Try a tin of baked beans next time, it will probably give you a supermarket price comparison.

"the software was ok until you got bored".
If it can't cope with any barcode it sees it is useless software.
It should just return an out of range message and wait for a valid barcode, NOT crash.

They'll be able to trace your wife through that barcode - and send her the Bill........

I also note that he mentioned two machines coped ok with patients so no inconvenience was caused by his messing. I await a follow-up post informing us of his intention to complain about wasting public money on the third!