Beyond the Drawbridge

Thanks to the Black Knight for offering me a place to vent things that I’d rather not put on a blog with my name on it. Like this story about the FACS booking system…

During my time at my old lab, I used the hospital’s flow cytometry facility to sort my cells. When we (lab and facility) moved to a new building, the facility merged with that of another hospital, and they changed their booking system.

The old system worked like this:
I would pop over to the facility, and the tech would say:
-“Oh, hi, how have you been? Need to sort? That’s great. I have some time on Wednesday two weeks from now.”
-“Nah, Wednesday is no good for this, can I go on Thursday or Friday?”
-“Well, I can fit you in on Friday, but I’d have to start half an hour earlier. Is that okay?”
-“Sure, thanks! See you!”
And they would write the booking in by hand on a supplier-swag monthly wall calendar, and I’d plan my transfection for the day before my appointment, and everything just functioned.

The new system “worked” like this:
They switched from the wall calendar to an online booking system that was originally meant for something else entirely, and adapted that so it kind of works for booking time on their machines. Everyone who had been using the facility needed to attend a seminar in which they showed us how to use the system. (To be fair, that was a good idea, because nobody could ever have figured it out on their own!) At the training they told us, by way of motivational story, how people at CSHL or Johns Hopkins or some other fancy US institute had to line up at 2AM for their FACS sorting, and we should be glad that we got this new system, which was at least not as bad as lining up at 2AM.
It’s very, very close, though.

To use the booking system, you had to sign up using an institutional (non-hotmailish) e-mail address. I never had a hospital e-mail address, because the university gave me a much better e-mail address – one that I could use forever – so I signed up with that. Once logged in, you had to select the type of machine you wanted to use, to look at the specific calendar of bookings. If the machine you needed was a sorter, you also had to book a person to go with it, so you had to look at TWO calendars: one for the machine and one for the tech, and match those up. The booking hours were only between 10:30 and 5, which fits in only 1-2 people per day, and because two facilities were merged there were more people in less time, so everything was always booked full weeks ahead. Plus, because you had to book one tech per machine, they couldn’t multitask anymore and run two machines at once, which was perfectly possible in the old system. Oh, and the system only allowed bookings maximally four weeks ahead of time, which meant that everything was always full the entire four weeks, but if you sat at the computer exactly four weeks (to the minute) ahead of the end of your desired time, you could try to be the first one to book that slot. How is this more convenient than just talking to them in person?

Because of this deadly competition for a time slot, people tended to book liberally. Of course, they then would realize closer to the date that they didn’t need that slot after all, but you don’t have to cancel until 24 hours ahead of time, so nobody bothered until then. After someone canceled, the facility’s administrator would send an e-mail to all the people signed up at the facility, including those who use entirely different machines, to let them know that a machine would be free the next day, on the off chance that someone had, in a fit of wasteful insanity, prepared their cells for sorting even though they didn’t have a sort time booked.

I am still getting those e-mails.
On my e-mail address that is good forever and that I use all the time…

Yesterday I replied to one of the “Availability of cancelled sort time on MoFlo tomorrow” e-mails to politely tell them that I had left the institute and this was irrelevant to me. (Not that it ever was relevant in the first place, because I never had cells ready when they sent the MoF(l)o messages *head-desk*.)
This is what I got in return:

“We cannot delete your name from the online booking system since it will delete all appointments that you made before.”

*blink* Yes? So? Print out the calendars, make a backup of your database or something. You can delete me without screwing up your archive of old appointments!
I was nice and polite and sent this. “Somewhat annoying” is a euphemism for “FACSing insane” in this context, of course.

“That’s somewhat annoying, though, for me to keep receiving these messages about available sort times. Is it possible to set it so that my e-mail address is still in your system but I just don’t get notifications?”

Surely there’s a setting somewhere to not send me e-mail?

This is what I got back:

“I am sorry for the inconvenience. Your e-mail is your account in the online booking system. Like I said we cannot delete your account from our system.
We are working with CCB to optimize our booking system try to inactivate the users that don’t use our system anymore. If that works, you will not receive e-mails from us. If you are not in the [institute removed] andmore, just delete the e-mails for now.
May be soon, you will not receive e-mails from us.”

Well, that’s just wonderful. At least they’re realistic about it, with the ifs and maybes.

Meanwhile, I’m going to fluorescently sort my e-mail to dump everything with the phrase “Availability of cancelled sort time” straight into a MoFlo-FACSing spam folder.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 25th, 2009 at 06:57 and is filed under bad admin, emails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.