The last few inches

Dear fellow CTOs: the Internet is broken and someone needs to fix it. And the only people whom I trust to do it are you, my comrades in high-end IT problem solving.

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Here’s a personal example that illustrates the level of disfunction I’m talking about. Recently, my father visited town, so I logged on to one of the travel megasites, booked his room at a local hotel, and punched in my credit card number, paying in advance to get a special deal.

I’m a busy guy, and this took all of five minutes. This is what the Internet is for — putting a just-in-time inventory at my fingertips. Armed with a confirmation from the travel megasite, I had booked the room a full 36 hours before my dad’s check-in. I went about my business, satisfied that I had done well.

Then it all began to fall apart. Eight hours after I got my confirmation, I received an e-mail from the travel megasite stating that the room I had booked was not actually available. I was asked to find another room via the site and to call the customer service line to arrange for another room.

This time, I picked a reputable national chain instead of the small, locally owned hotel I had chosen before, hoping that it would be linked tightly with the reservations brain of the travel megasite. When I called the customer service line and indicated the hotel I had chosen, the rep put me on hold and called the new hotel to confirm my reservation. I endured the soothing Enya-inspired hold music, and after a lengthy wait, the customer service rep came back to say that my room was confirmed, and I got another e-mail confirmation. Dad was all set.

When we arrived at the hotel the next evening, I realized very quickly from the long line at the front desk that Widespread Panic (one of the “jam bands” that has unfortunately filled the guitar noodling vacuum left by the breakups of Phish and the Grateful Dead) was playing a three-night stand at a nearby concert venue, and to steal the prescient words of Eric Cartman from a recent South Park episode, I thought, “We’re looking at a full-blown hippie jam fest the size of which we have never seen.” I was glad I had the reservation, lest my dad be begging for space on a dirty mattress in the back of a VW bus — a terrible fate for a conservative Southern gentleman.

But the reservation did not exist. For all of the online and phone time I had spent, all the travel megasite had done was charge my credit card and send over a fax to the hotel with my dad’s reservation. The hotel manager told me they had stopped accepting new reservations two days before. Fortunately, one room was available for a walk-in and we took it — at a higher rate than I had already paid in advance. I’m still in the process of getting refunded.

An ignored piece of paper sitting on a fax machine had undone an otherwise sophisticated process: I had accessed a site in a datacenter across the country, searched hundreds of hotels in seconds, entered a credit card that was authorized via a web of global financial systems — and after the thousands of miles, the critical last three feet between the fax machine and the local hotel’s system was an abyss that could not be crossed.

My fellow CTOs, systems with this level of human and analog dependency don’t work, so don’t build them. Remember, it could be your dad tossing and turning in the back of a musty VW bus.