
A Vacancy Has Been Detected (2019) - zdw
https://kellysutton.com/2019/06/19/a-vacancy-has-been-detected.html
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gherig4
That email seems very human and reasonable and it did its job perfectly. It
warned the student of a potential outcome and the student was able to act on
that warning. The alternative of somebody moving in one day without warning
would be the real fail case and that didn't happen.

~~~
SilasX
At risk of sounding like a jerk, I agree and think this whole reaction is
overblown.

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.

~~~
prostheticvamp
What’s overblown? Did you read the actual post?

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.

~~~
SilasX
Doing it so thoroughly that you purge any reminders of someone's death _is_ 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".

~~~
clort
> I don't see how it should have been done differently

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.

~~~
rawbeef
So all vacancy notifications should be sent to building coordinators who are
responsible for personally notifying tenants? What if they forget or do it
tactlessly?

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.

~~~
hombre_fatal
> Part of emotional maturity is learning to cope with "cosmic indifference."

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.

------
afandian
It's a terrible situation to be in. The correct answer to this is, by
definition, thinking about User Experience. But unless it's actually rigorous
it's just as bad, or worse, than not having it.

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!

~~~
caseyf7
And Expensify is even worse for the administrators. One of the worst admin
experiences in SaaS.

~~~
dickeytk
I've never used it, is it worse than concur?

~~~
caseyf7
I would say concur is worse for submitters and Expensify is worse for admins

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tlb
Part of the problem is the uncanny valley of emails that look human-written,
but aren’t. Nobody expects, eg, a piece of hospital equipment to display
empathy when a patient dies. It can just beep and display HR 000. But people
expect an email that’s not obviously a form to be composed with empathy for
the receiver.

So you can improve it with either more empathy or more automated-form design.

~~~
strken
Yes. I think it would have been much less offensive if the "Go Lions!", "Dear
XYZ", the explanation of not enough rooms, and "Sincerely, Your Friendly
Campus System" had been removed.

"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."

------
smoyer
Sorry for your loss (Kelly) ... I was also a (Nittany) Lion and had a similar
experience but it wasn't software based. In my second year, a good friend of
mine was killed in a car accident. She was a year ahead of me (and not in a
STEM curriculum) but we ended up having three BDRs (Basic Degree Requirements
- now GenEd at PSU) together that semester. In all three of those classes, no
one told the professor what had happened and, knowing I was her friend (we sat
together, worked on group projects together and left the room together), they
naturally asked me where she was. That was a pretty tough question for an
otherwise macho (the term at the time) 19 year-old to answer. I grew up pretty
stoic (PA Dutch family - non-Amish) but here I sit 30+ years later and tear up
a bit recounting this time of my life.

~~~
hinkley
There are some cultural groups in North America where, in a time of crisis
like this, Standard Operating Procedure is to bring food and company and let
the affected person chose when or if to talk. You just sit and do something
else, and if they need anything you're there, and if they want to talk about
it they can, but they don't have to if they don't want to.

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.

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hombre_fatal
I notice the author doesn't even pitch any improvements like writing their
ideal version of that email.

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.

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domador
It's hard for me to think of a situation where a dorm-room vacancy-
notification email to a student would be a good idea. I can think of only sad
situations that would produce a vacancy, in addition to the one in the article
(for example, someone having to quit or pause college due to a family crisis,
or running out of money to pay for college, or flunking out.) At best, this
kind of email should go to a college employee to look into the matter, not to
a student occupying the room.

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.

~~~
SilasX
>It's hard for me to think of a situation where a dorm-room vacancy-
notification email to a student would be a good idea. I can think of only sad
situations that would produce a vacancy, in addition to the one in the article
(for example, someone having to quit or pause college due to a family crisis,
or running out of money to pay for college, or flunking out.)

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".

~~~
domador
Thanks for the additional example of a vacancy situation. In this case, I
literally meant it when I said "I" can only think of sad situations", which is
why others' examples are helpful.

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.

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devchix
This is a log output message. The problem with logs is that they are first and
primarily written _for_ the developer. _I 'm_ writing the alert for the
condition _I_ need to know about. It's only as an afterthought that they are
revised to be read by not-developer and bear some semblance of communicating
an event or status. This is why most logs, especially the debug kinds, are
inscrutable. Devs may eventually put in logs for other people, but unless
thought is put into who will consume the log and what the expected actions
would be, the original logging text remains.

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.

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Thorrez
I think the title of the post is slightly misleading. The title is in the
passive voice

> 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.

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xen0
I think a nice, less charged example of this was given by Tom Scott's video on
being called regarding STI results - an automated system couldn't give him his
results and so transferred him to a human with the delays and brief panic that
entails.

[https://youtu.be/LZM9YdO_QKk](https://youtu.be/LZM9YdO_QKk)

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Aloha
This is why systems like this ought to have reason codes, each reason code
should have a different friendly message sent to the user.

~~~
whatshisface
"Your status is CODE 444: DEATH OF ROOMMATE. Please report to the campus
housing administration so that your dead roommate may be replaced with a live
one. Go Lions!"

~~~
lostlogin
> CODE 444

I think a ‘410: Gone’ might be better.

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mercwear
This is a sad situation because of a death taking place. That said, I do not
personally believe there is anything wrong with the email other than the
wording. Automation exists in all parts of our lives and sometimes an outcome
like this will occur.

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jeffadotio
This is a similar story about automation mishaps. It was posted here and I
heard the story on NPR.

[https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-
me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

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aj7
Did they add a death bit and a test?

