It’s no secret that technology powers our world. We use it for everything. From healthcare, to social contact, and beyond into finances. I can’t remember the last time I paid a bill with a letter and a check. Or wrote a letter to someone.

But what happens when technology screw ups affect you, and you personally? I’ve had a few instances where things did go awry and could have gone much worse because of a technical problem.

Now, don’t get me wrong, people make mistakes, too. And people make machines so that makes sense. But the automation makes things a little cold and technology doesn’t have “intuition” when things don’t look right. And technology can’t cut through red tape in order to fix things. (and as it turns out, neither can people).

The tl;dr

I love long-reads; however, I often wish there was a quick “summary” section for when I don’t have time. So real quick:

a state-local HealthCare.Gov site took my daughter off my plan renewal without my knowledge. Appeals failed and so I ended up with $3K in tax penalties state revenue service stopped automated payments for no reason and then ended up letting me know that something was wrong after it forced my employer to take the money out of my paycheck a debt owner’s payment system stopped taking money out of my account, I got sent to collections and collections agency failed to send proper notices. My credit score got screwed up.

As a developer, I’ve made my own mistakes that almost resulted in employee termination. And in other places, possibly caused a few small business to take very risky actions that seemed like safe actions based on math my programming executed.

In every one of those instances, companies and people could have fixed the problem but didn’t care so that’s obviously a part of the problem as well.

Let’s Skip Security

Let’s skip that part. We all understand those problems. From exposing data to the wrong users, to allowing yourself to be hacked. These things lead to identity theft issues, etc. etc.

I’d like to focus on the every day bugs rather than security breaches (something I’m not an expert about).

When HealthCare.Gov Fails, You Lose $3K

tl;dr HealthCare.Gov had a bug in the renewal system which resulted in my daughter not being covered for the entire year. Which resulted in nearly $3K of tax penalties.

We all remember the day that HealthCare.Gov released. It was a clusterfuck. And a few years down the road, it’s not as bad; however, I got into quite a few problems with it. I recently discussed the pitfalls of Health Insurance and the “death by a thousand cuts”.

I’m not here to rehash that.

Here’s a story about how the technical part of this system cost me $3K.

A couple of years ago, my daughter was born. I got on my state-local HealthCare.Gov site, added her to the group and picked a plan.

I signed her up, got a card for her and kept going with my life.

In December, I received an email about coverage hike. My coverage went up by two hundred dollars. I wasn’t okay with that. At my level, there wasn’t much that was covered fully and other than disaster-level emergencies, it didn’t make sense for me to be in this “dead zone” where co-pay + pre-deductible pay was more than paying cash. Plus, there is that two hundred dollars to think about which ended up covering any and all appointments to all doctors in that year.

I went in to renew, found a solid plan and I signed up. I got an email confirming my “purchase”.

I started working on my taxes this year in January. I was excited to get it done early until I got paperwork from my insurance and noticed my daughter missing from the roster.

What ensued was hours upon hours of getting through people in the insurance, in the HC.Gov staff, etc. until I got to a person that could explain the situation. Here’s how that conversation went (paraphrased):

“It looks like the system took your daughter off from the group renewal. I’m not sure why it would do that.”

Me: “What do you mean? So she wasn’t covered the entire year?”

“No, she wasn’t. It must have been a glitch in the system. It’s not supposed to delete people from the group randomly.”

Me: “Well, I’m glad she didn’t have any sort of an emergency. What can I do about it now?”

“I’m glad, too. That could have been bad. There is nothing to do. I can’t change anything, your insurance can’t change anything either.”

“Is there somewhere I can appeal to about this? The penalties are horribly high for this kind of thing.”

“Sure, you can appeal to IRS but you’ll most likely get rejected. You can certainly try. I wish you the best of luck!”

My luck ran out when I did my taxes and was faced with nearly $3K of penalties due to a software mistake.

Not-So-Automated Automated Payment Systems (Revenue Service)

tl;dr Automated payments failed, notice-sending service failed and I ended up with a docked paycheck and an employer that was wondering wtf is going on with me.

This is an interesting story because it inspired this article. I’m still seething from it.

A few years back, my employer messed up in setting up my (state-level) tax withholding which resulted in a few thousand dollars worth of unpaid taxes. I was a little under the strain money-wise so I opted to setup a payment plan. Low percentage meant that it wasn’t a bad deal.

A few hiccups in the beginning got quickly smoothed out and a flat amount was withdrawn from my account every month right after I got my paycheck (to ensure there was always money for it and I wouldn’t forget).

I love automated systems. I love being able to put my bank info into it once and “set it and forget it” (except for Comcast and we all know why). I did that.

I got a yearly print-out of how much I paid and how much was left. It’s an encouraging sheet because you know how much closer you are to having that payment chunk back in your budget.

But then, I got a letter telling me I’m at risk of defaulting on my agreement.

Wait, what? I called the local revenue department and talked to them about it.

It looks like their system randomly stopped withdrawing the proper amounts for the automated payment system.

They checked the records: the payment wasn’t attempted, I had perfect payment history since the beginning, and this didn’t make sense at all. I re-entered my info and the payment system started working again.

Until it failed again a couple of months later. I paid manually this time. The next month, I forgot I didn’t have an automated payment set up and paid a few days late.

Then I got an email from my company’s HR that the revenue service contacted them and they’re docking the full amount from my next couple of paychecks and there’s nothing they can do about it.

They told me that this happens when someone fails to pay on multiple occasions and defaults on their payment system and they sent me a copy of the request. Before I could do anything, my paycheck was already docked.

…Then I got a later from the revenue service telling me they might have to dock my paycheck. I have 30 days to make things right before they take action (action they’ve already taken).

All of this was done through an automated system. Payments failed to run, letters were sent out in the wrong order, and I faced a paycheck that was 25% lower than I expected.

Not-So-Automated Automated Payment Systems (Collections)

tl;dr Payment system failed with the original debt owner and collections failed to send a notice of collection. My credit got screwed up but at least collections was helpful.

This article is already long enough so let’s get through this one quickly.

It has to do with automated payment systems. Again, we’re all used to being able to “set it and forget it”. Well, the latter part of that statement put me at odds with a debt I was paying down. The payment system stopped working and a few months later, I was sent to collections and a few months later that collections agency decided to finally contact me.

The monthly payment was quite small so I didn’t notice it as an “extra” amount on my bank account at the end of the month.

The agency contacted me and told me that due to my refusal to pay collections fees and paying the original debt, they had to report me to the credit agency (whatever that’s called). After quite a long frustrating conversation, it turns out that the letters that were queued up to send were never sent out. And the phone calls that should have happened were never there nor logged in their system.

I’m glad they had an audit system but damn. The agency fixed the reporting mistake but they could not get me back to paying the original debt owner. I was still dealing with collections and that part was still on my credit.

When I called the debt owner in order to make things right, their financial service department told me that it was my responsibility to check the automated payment system and that they’re doing me a favor allowing me to pay debt over time.

The debt owner refused to deal with me and so I was stuck with a collection agency. At least, and I gotta thank them for this, when I set up my payment system with them, it’s been working like a well-adjusted Swiss watch for the past year and I’m almost done paying everything off.

Unfortunately, the report that I went to collections lowered my credit score and that affected a great deal of things since then. Including my APR on my car refinance.

My own mistakes

Here’s the thing, I don’t entirely blame the developers. I have made my own share of mistakes.

The dashboard

I was once contracted to build a dashboard which tracked employee performance over the course of each month based on some simple statistics.

I nearly got an employee fired because of a bad SQL query

You read that right. Luckily, the manager caught it because he wasn’t gun-ho about the whole “fire an employee based what a dashboard tells me”. He spoke to the employee and then I spoke to them (wasn’t as awkward as you can imagine) and I found out that several records that went into their stats weren’t being saved.

The calculations

I’m currently working at a company whose product is supposed to replace teams of people that do manual calculations which business use for a specific risk assessment. The software works really well but also assumes that companies use some specific formulas for calculations. And as a developer, I understand only a sliver of what’s really going on (I depend on other people to write the formulas).

These businesses used our calcs to make strategic business decisions. Luckily, we’re in the “estimation” process so there are some people down the line before estimation -> reality.

An independent auditor checked one company’s records to reveal that we failed to multiply one specific factor (one specific equation) by a specific percentage. It was obvious after she pointed it out but that equation cascaded to the rest of the program and all of our reports. All of our reports overestimated almost every single calculation.

We serve big and small companies and had a smaller company taken us at our word, they could have easily lost a ton of money. Because I made a mistake.

So when a manager pushes to release bad code

I probably shouldn’t stress this but holy hell is it necessary.

Don’t push bad code if it could result in bad consequences.

If your dropdown is crappy, I don’t care. If my comment fails to save and so I have to refresh the page and try again, that’s annoying.

But if you’re running banking software and you tell me I have the money to buy Nintendo Switch while I don’t actually have it, I’m going to be pissed and probably swimming in overdraft fees for weeks

I realize that banking software has higher standards than most but how about budgetting software? What about stuff like Mint that pulls in data from my bank?

What if you have an invoice automation software that marked an email as “sent” but never actually sent it? At best, a “second notice” will fix the problem, but most likely, you’re causing someone’s small business headaches and possibly customers.